Kid Math: The Great Graph Contest

The Great Graph Contest by Loreen Leedy was in the math section at the library and it looked like something that my little guy might like to read to learn about graphs.  Shouldn't learning about graphs be fun?  I wonder what grade kids normally learn about graphs??  Probably not kindergarten but this is a super cute book to introduce the concept!!

The book itself is a little hard to read because it mostly a conversation style book with the animals but it gave pictures of the graphs that they made.  It was interesting to see the different graphs and styles that they made, as well as them doing graphs of things that my little man could also do.  The contest was one of the creatures trying to make a better graph than the other creature but they were all pretty neat.

My son quickly decided that he wanted to make his own graphs.  We started with a Ven diagram.  He chose to do red and blue and in the middle he decided to make it purple since red and blue make purple.  Really?!  Yup, picked it himself!!

After he put all of the cars in the circles, we cleaned up with counting the number of cars. He wrote them in his observation notebook.  He put the 0 on the first line when he was looking for the second line which we are still working on :)

Then we did a different graph with all the color of the cars lined up in lines based on the color written on the bottom.  He did his observation that we had the most of the red cars.  Little did we know that we had so many red cars!!  We didn't get to count the numbers on these because the little man took a road trip to Home Depot with Daddy.

The great thing is that we got to read a book, do a graph and practice writing.  He didn't even know that we were "learning."  I think that we are going to be doing some graphing for days to come.  I better find some other things to graph soon :)

It is always great to have a few books around that they might be interested in learning from with a quick project associated to whip up.  I need to do a little more work ahead of time to be ready for all this learning!!  Check it out and have your little ones graphing their favorite things soon.