As many of you saw on facebook, Middlenificent had a graphing project last week in math. After learning about graphs in her first grade Singapore Math book, she was supposed to design a graphing project and do it. I was opting for a two or three-option question, but she really wanted to ask people their favorite colors, so we went for it.

She had a few people she wanted answers from, so they received personal face-to-face questions, calls, emails, or facebook messages, but then she decided she wanted more! So we posted the question on facebook, thinking we’d get twenty or so more answers. We were blown away as the answers started pouring in nearly the minute I hit enter. She ended up with over 100 responses!

Once we had our responses, she made a tally chart.

I wanted her to feel the concrete one-to-one correspondence of a bar graph, so our next step was to build one. It was a challenge coming up with something we had enough of in all these colors, but we finally had the idea of putting together a lot of our card games. By borrowing from regular Uno, Winnie-the-Pooh Uno, Barbie Uno, Strawberry Shortcake Uno (seriously, who has this many kinds of Uno?!!!!!) and a few more cards from Clue-Do for orange and grey, we had enough!

She had so much fun putting this graph together. I thought it might get tedious with such large numbers, but she loved it! Soon, Littlenificent wandered over to see what was going on. I thought this might be a recipe for disaster, but thankfully, I was wrong again!

Littlenificent came to ask me what Middle was doing, and I tried to explain a little about graphing. She actually does some roll-and-graph activities in our gentle preschool homeschooling, so she kind of understood. Then I remembered I had a great book about graphing hiding in our homeschooling resources, so I pulled it out. This was met with much excitement!

The graphing stopped for a few minutes as they read the book together.

Finally, the graph was finished. What a proud moment!

Our next step was to transfer the graph to paper. Middlenificent opted to do this on the computer. She had an idea in mind for how she could do it using Pages on my Mac, and with a few suggestions from me, she was off. I was amazed at how quickly she pulled a really great looking graph together. This kid is six!!!

So here’s the finished product, made entirely by her! Didn’t she do a great job? Thank you to everyone who helped by responding to our query on facebook!