What’s in the Bag?

On Friday, our second graders wrapped up graphing. I decided to dig into my stash pile of all treasures I have saved from over the years… also known as the junk I’m hoarding just in case one ever needs an extra bead, feather, popsicle stick, or anything else of the random category!

I made each partner group a bag of four groups of items. Some of the things I dropped in were: feathers, paperclips, notepads, beads, googly eyes, sticks, pipe cleaners, stickers, foam pieces, poms, legos, toy cars, etc. The first thing students had to do was dump out the items and put them into four categories.

I gave each student a blank graph so that we could work through the parts of a graph together. We came up with a title, organized the scale, and labeled our categories. We had some really great discussions about why each part of the graph is important.

Once we had our paper all ready to go, students worked to graph the items in their bags. We changed tables and checked the graph of another student. This gave them exposure to another group of items/graph and allowed them to help each other fix any mistakes.

We needed to do a little graph talk, so I gave each student a sticky note to write three things about their graph.

We finished up by making ourselves holding our graphs! Crafts like this are great to do once students have finished their work. It gives early finishers something fun to work on, but doesn’t interfere with those that work slower than others. If they don’t get to the craft… it’s not a huge deal because they did the bulk of their work already.