Books
If you let the Big Ideas of data analysis guide your use of books and activities, children can learn that quantitative information is something they can do something about. They will feel empowered to reorganize it to create answers to questions and to discover new questions that they did not have before. They will know that a chart or graph is meant to tell them something useful, and will want to figure out what that is. Here are different book-related ideas for launching data analysis activities.
Copyright: Erikson Institute’s Early Math Collaborative. Reprinted from Big Ideas of Early Mathematics: What Teachers of Young Children Need to Know (2014), Pearson Education.
Big Ideas
● It is useful to compare parts of the data and to draw conclusions about the data as a whole.
● Data must be represented in order to be interpreted, and how data are gathered and organized depends on the question.
● The purpose of collecting data is to answer questions when the answers are not immediately obvious.
3 Animal Picture Books That Explore Questions About Data
Data analysis uses math to make sense of the world. How can we use the books children love to show math visually? What is data analysis in math books and math-related storybooks? And how can we bring that out in these stories?
