Birthday Graph

Can you imagine not remembering when your birthday is?  The struggle is real for many 7 and 8 year olds I know.  Combine that with the fact that I have set a goal of visiting and resisting graphing often this year  (my goal now is once a month) and you’ve got a good first week of school activity.

Today we went outside for math, and we created a graph of our birthdays using a jump rope and some paper.  Here is some of our work, with student names cleverly disguised of course.

We used the rope to form the x and y axis. It allowed us to do some revision so everything would fit.

I did have to look up the birthdays of a few friends.  But tomorrow we are going transfer this giant graph to a small corner of a bulletin board and then I’ll never have to look them up again!  (ha)

The thing that amazed me most was that as soon as the graph started to take shape, I started to hear students comment on  what they were seeing.  “July is the most popular month to be born in our class.” and “I was born in the same month as Mrs. Corbett!” It was a lot of fun, gave me some insight into how much they know about graphing, an also showed me some learning skills we need to look at.