Great Lesson - Heather Zemanek

Great Lesson Ideas: Graphing with Colors with Heather Zemanek

Zemanek: [00:00:07] Hello. My name is Heather Zemanek, and I teach third grade at Jenks East Elementary. [00:00:13]

[00:00:15] This lesson is called graphing with colors. [00:00:17]

[00:00:20] First we started off with the lesson by reviewing some of those concepts that we have learned before with graphing. [00:00:26]

[In class questions and answers [00:26 – 00:31]

[00:00:30] What a graph involves, what data is. How we can organize it. I spread out all the little squares, the transparency squares of different colors when the kids were out of the room so they wouldn’t see. Then I told the kids when they came back in the room that they had 30 seconds to find as many little squares as they could. [00:00:49]

[00:00:50] Ready? Go. Three, two, one, stop. [00:01:02]

[00:01:02] When time stopped, they have to go back to their seats and then we talked about making a tally chart and how we can organize our data together and kind of get some totals going. [00:01:12]

[00:01:13] What do you think I set up here on the board? Alana. [00:01:17]

Child: [00:01:17] A chart. [00:01:17]

Zemanek: [00:01:18] A chart. What do you think we should do it? It’s not going to be our bar graph yet, so this is our chart. What am I going to do in this column you think? Noah? [00:01:26]

Child: [00:01:27] See how many blues and greens and clears—[00:01:32]

Zemanek: [00:01:32] Okay and what we’ve done in the past is do—tallies. Then we’ve given the actual number. I want you to make a tally chart with your table about how many blue you have altogether, how many green, how many clear, how many red, how many yellow altogether. [00:01:50]

Child: [00:01:51] Six blues and two greens. One, two, three four, one. [00:01:56]

of 3 Great Lesson Ideas: Graphing with Colors with Heather Zemanek

Child: [00:01:57] And we did eight, nine, ten, eleven. You got yellow? [00:01:59]

Zemanek: [00:02:00] Okay so you already added them up. [00:02:02]

Child: [00:02:01] Nine blues, nine blues. We have ten of these. Ten green. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. [00:02:08]

Zemanek: [00:02:08] Okay we’re going to total each one so I’m going to need each group to be ready, okay? [00:02:13]

Child: [00:02:14] One, one, one. [00:02:15]

Zemanek: [00:02:14] One green. [00:02:15]

Child: [00:02:15] Nine. Nine. I say 15. Whoa man. [00:02:20]

Zemanek: [00:02:26] Ethan what was your clear? [00:02:27]

Child: [00:02:28] Six, eleven. [00:02:30]

Zemanek: [00:02:30] Eleven, six and zero—[00:02:32]

[00:02:33] We talked a little bit about what does a bar graph have to have. [00:02:36]

[00:02:36] Let’s review together what does a bar graph look like? [00:02:39]

Child: [00:02:39] Number down the side, and number or colors. [00:02:43]

Zemanek: [00:02:44] We have to have a scale, we have to have our items along the bottom. [00:02:47]

[00:02:48] You have all of the complete information up here. I want you to make a bar graph with your group displaying this information. [00:02:57]

Child: [00:02:57] So go from right—one, two, three, four, five, right align it. Let’s see boy, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 30. And it went all the way up to 50. [00:03:07]

of 3 Great Lesson Ideas: Graphing with Colors with Heather Zemanek

Child: [00:03:08] We are counting blue all the way up to 40 because— counting by 2’s up to 50. And then we’re coloring in up to the number that’s on the board. [00:03:23]

Zemanek: [00:03:23] Had lots of different discussion about how the scale should be set up. [00:03:27]

Child: [00:03:28] Yeah. It’s about 40. Yeah. That’s good. [00:03:30]

Zemanek: [00:03:31] And kids had different ideas and that’s where I was really able to see some of the kids that really understand how to read the bar graphs, and ones that needed a little bit of explaining. [00:03:42]

[00:03:42] Look at your time chart. Brianna. [00:03:43]

[00:03:44] To wrap up the lesson, we brought all of our data together and what conclusions could we make from it. Then we could relate it to how we really use graphing in the real world. [00:03:54]

[00:03:55] 45. This is where we analyze out data and figure out why we found mostly green and yellow, and—[00:04:03]

[00:04:03] I like this lesson because the students are generating their own ideas. [00:04:08]

Child: [00:04:08] A clear one could be an animal that —camouflages [ [00:04:15]

Zemanek: [00:04:16] Ah so why does he think that the clear might be like camouflage? [00:04:21]

[00:04:22] They are analyzing the data and then they relate it to other subjects all on their own. You should use this lesson in your classroom because it gets the kids excited about learning. [00:04:32]