My wife sells jewelry! Treat yourself to some bling!Treat yourself to some bling!
I am an Amazon.com Affiliate, and I warmly invite you to shop using my store!

Try Amazon Prime 30-Day Free Trial
Join HBO Free Trial

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Tally ho!

Today began the annual "Survey your Neighbor" portion of 3rd grade math. We've been going over bar graphs, and we will soon begin pictographs, so the kids started their 6-weeks project, the first part of which involved collecting data.

The kids had to fill in the blank on this prompt, "Which ____________ do you like best?" and then supply 4 choices that fit the topic. The kids then used that question to make a tally chart, surveying their classmates as well as a class from across the hall.

I didn't have as many interesting topics this year as I have in the past. There were plenty of "favorite color," "favorite animal," and "favorite food." There were lots of "favorite shoes" as well as a couple of "favorite cartoons."

Then there are the scary movies. Whenever a kid pics, "Which movie (muvi [sic]) do you like best?" the choices almost always seem to be the most horrific, un-kid-friendly movies possible. Saw 6. Chucky. Paranormal Activity 2. One little girl's survey had these 3 movies plus Snow White. I told her that since I hadn't seen any of the others, I would have to choose Snow White.

I only heard one kid -- in one of the other classes -- asking people, "Which teacher do you like best?" I figured it was a no-brainer to vote for myself.

My colleague told me that one of her girls had a survey for favorite season where the choices were Summer, Winter, Fall, and Snow.

Now that the data has been collected, the next step will be to convert that information into a bar graph. So far, the graphing has been pretty good -- we'll see how they do when it's their own pet project.

3 comments:

postzoom said...

We are looking for great blogs and we would love it if you registered yours with us.

PostZoom is a directory of the best blog posts which helps readers find great blog posts and blog owners drive more traffic to their blog.

If you are interested in joining, please check us out!

Thanks,
Eric Castelli
PostZoom

TeacherFromTN said...

We are right in the middle of this unit as well--it's one of my favorites. I had an evaluation yesterday, and my lesson was turning our surveys and tally charts into bar graphs! I have such a "nice" class this year that I found their surveys a little dull--no one even did the favorite teacher survey!! I guess they didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings when my bar was a skyscraper and theirs were just little houses! : )

Anonymous said...

That's funny, my third graders are in a data collection unit too. One came in to survey the fifth graders in tech with me and the question was "How many pillows do you have on your bed? And if you have 2 houses, how much on your bed at your mom's?"

I was shocked that only 2 kids said 1 pillow. Several had 5 or more.