Mittens or Gloves {A Graphing Lesson}

So, until today, it has been about 70 degrees outside.  Gotta love the south.  Well, even though we've had no reason to pull out our mittens or gloves this winter, I felt the need to make a wintery graph anyway!  {We can pretend!}  I used the mitten and glove cut outs from Marvelous Mittens by my sweet and talented friend, Cara Carroll.  The kids started by writing their name in the circle of which they preferred to wear to keep their hands warm--mittens or gloves.

They could already tell which circle had more names, but we had to carefully count together to figure out how many names were in each circle.  I challenged the kids to brainstorm another way to show our information--to make it more organized.  The kids suggested a tally chart, so that is where we started.  We no longer knew who exactly wanted to wear mittens or gloves (by name), but we could tell very easily from the tally chart how many people liked mittens and how many liked gloves.

After the tally chart, I handed out the pictograph pieces.  The kids decorated them, and we glued them to our pictograph chart--where we continued to make observations about our data.  We talked about how we could count the amount of mittens in the easiest way possible.  Our class decided to group them into 2's, since we have recently been practicing counting by 2's.  Someone saw that 10 more kids liked wearing mittens better than gloves--by counting up from the number 5.  {Yay for mathematical thinkers!}  The conclusion was that most kids in our class like to wear mittens when it is cold outside.  Now we are just awaiting a cold day...