What Do You Notice? Picture Graph

Skills

Primary students (K-2): counting, days of the week, comparison (equal to/more than/less than), reading a graph

Intermediate students (3-5): reading a graph, skip counting by 2's, even/odd, fractions

Mathematical Background

This is a picture graph that represents the number of inches of snow on a given day. Since each snowflake represents 2 inches, the 3 snowflakes on Monday indicates 6 inches of snow. This is a nice opportunity for students to practice skip counting. Notice that on Saturday there are 4 whole snowflakes and a half of a snowflake. Students need to figure out the value of half of a snowflake by determining what is half of 2.

Instead of having students record their observations on a post-it, I provided a list of starter questions parents could ask their kids.