1st Grade and Multi 1/2 “Fall Festival Integrated Leaf Project”

Note: This year I am blogging weekly reflections at my school site (weskids.com) in order to provide more transparency in my teaching for parents, students, and the community (local and global). I will be cross-posting most of the entries here at Bit By Bit as well. You can see the original posts at the “Reflections by Mr. S” blog.

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You might remember that 1st and Multi 1/2 grade students took a lovely “Leaf Walk” back in October with the CORE team to collect leaves. Their collection of leaves is part of the “Fall Festival Integrated Unit,” shared between CORE classes and their own classrooms. You can see our Standards for the unit HERE: (http://bit.ly/1gNs7fS). For the past few Units, students have been working on Tallying and Bar Graphs with their classroom teachers as well as with me in Computer.

Tally Chart

We started the study in Computer by using a great lesson (free!) from Brain Pop Jr on “Tally Charts and Bar Graphs,” which can be found HERE (http://bit.ly/9Lk3XG). Then students brought in the tally charts they created in their classrooms and used the program, KidPix to represent their data in bar graph form.

Brain Pop Jr.

I made the template that you see below, but students had to type their own names in and use the “bucket” tool to create their key and graphs. When finished, students drew a picture to accompany the theme of the data collected.

As you can see by the examples below, there were two different templates students had to choose from. In one template, the numbers range from 1 to 12, and in the other template, the numbers count by 5’s in order to reach 60. Students had to decide which template would best fit their data. Those that had a large collection of leaves, for example, and had to choose the “60” template, needed to not only count by “fives” but also decide whether to “round up” or “round down” their numbers.

bar   bar 2

Things you can do at home with your students:

  • Over the next few weeks, you should see your student’s tally charts and bar graphs come home. Ask him/her the differences in how their data was represented with both forms. Which did they like better? Which one is easier for them to read?
  • What did their class find: were there more Maple, Birch, or Oak leaves collected on the walk?
  • Ask them to tell you what they did in the other CORE classes as well as their home room that connected with the Leaf Project.
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