Aside from filling up my shopping cart today on Teachers Pay Teachers, I am preparing my things for the new school year. I have been VERY busy and haven't put as much thought into as I feel I should. I have been doing curriculum writing for my school district in the area of science which consumes a lot of personal time, but I love it!
I created a data analysis and graphing bundle recently based off of what I did in my kindergarten classroom this past year. A big push from our school district last year was graphing since it is so heavily tested in the upper grades on the STAAR test (Texas). I recently completed a "study" on the third, fourth, and fifth grades mathematics assessments and was blown away at the results. See the full results on the Preview for the bundle.
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| 5 Minutes a Day Bundle |
Anywho, I proved that data analysis and understanding how to read and interpret data from graphs is very important, especially in the format of a table. Okay, you may have known that--but I proved it to myself! I created and designed more than just a cutesy pack, but a practical pacing guide with scaffolded critical thinking questions (based off questions found on STAAR in the three grade levels--they are shown below clipped together with binder rings--binder rings sold separately.). Looks can be deceiving! THIS IS A HIGHER LEVEL THINKING SKILLS BUNDLE OF JOY!
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| 5 Minute a Day Bundle |
Students take ownership as they collect and record the data on the graph of the week (each student "graphs in" weekly). Each day, something different is done we collect on the first day (including converting data on bar graph to a table, questioning, and labeling the parts of the graph to build content-specific academic vocabulary).
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| 5 Minute a Day Bundle |
The scaffolded questions are written to be a direct match to the TEKS (Texas Standards). They grow in complexity and are arranged in stages. Stage 1 represents basic "right there" questions while Stage 3 are the most complex questions where students have to combine the data set. In the middle are inferencing questions and basic operations (finding the difference, etc.) As a bonus, I added some sentence stems cards (for English learners) and multiple choice cards (for upper grade to write their own questions.)
There is also an extension piece that is added, especially designed for English learners. Look at the photograph above. Do you see the blue arrows? These are blackline masters and include significant vocabulary for data analysis and graphing. A special piece I like to do with my students is having them label the graph, after we study it for a few days. Not only do they begin learning the content-specific words, but they also have a concrete example for learning these new words. If you label the graph and table every week, can you imagine what smart statisticians you will have in your classroom?
My students were very successful in this method of teaching graphing and data analysis and I know yours will be too! There is only printing and preparing on your end...everything is done for you!
I hope this post inspires you to incorporate data analysis in your classroom and if you want to use my five minutes-a-day data resource, it's in my TpT shop.
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