Let me tell you a little (mildly embarrassing) story about how I came to discover that I needed to teach graphing in science.
There I was, in yet another curriculum meeting (with a curriculum director who is totally clueless about our science standards). I was oscillating between zoning out and watching the birds outside the window. We were reviewing last year’s standardized test results. Fun times.
😴 Honestly, I wasn’t paying attention AT ALL. My students (and my science colleagues’ students, too) do really well on the state test, so we’re rarely in the hot seat over scores. I’m used to sitting through meeting after meeting where the focus is on math and ELA scores.
😬 But then… I got caught. The focus turned to science, and I’m the de facto leader of the department, so all eyes were on me. And I didn’t know why. (I was watching birds, remember.)
As it turns out, my students did horribly on two of the questions – like 20% lower than the state average. So now I’m caught off guard (my bad) AND I’m finding out that there was a problem with my teaching.
“What topics were they?” I asked.
“Natural selection and weather” she said.
🤯 WHAAAT?!!? I teach those concepts inside and out! There’s NO WAY my students did that poorly on those topics! No way.
💣 But they did. My students bombed those questions… bad.
And when the state released the actual questions, I figured out why.
📈📊 The questions my kids tanked were questions with GRAPHS in them. So, even if my students did know natural selection and weather inside and out, if they couldn’t read a graph, they couldn’t answer the question.
Crap.
But if I’m honest, this wasn’t the actual first time I realized that my students’ graphing skills were… lacking. This has been a long time coming.
Is it the same for you? Do you ever watch a student making a graph and have to stop your face from contorting into some sort of a meme? What are they doing?!?
The kids just haven’t been coming to me with the ability to graph data any more… at all.
📉 From my perspective, graphing skills have really plummeted in the last few years. I know they’ve been taught graphing, but… it doesn’t seem like it.
It has gotten to the point that I realize I have to explicitly teach and practice graphing with my kids.
FIRST, I explicitly teach graphing. I start with these two activities towards the beginning of the year. ⬇️
➡️ I assign (and discuss at length) an introductory reading about graphing. It’s a nice intro to graph types, the axes, and so on. It’s really basic, but this is what my kids are needing… the basics. This article gets us all on the same page, no matter what graphing skills they come in with from prior grades.
➡️ I use graphing worksheets to get my kids some practice. These worksheets include bar graph and line graph practice and go in a series. The first is super basic practice, and then they get a little more challenging with each one.
SECOND, I integrate science graphing into my content lessons.
Graphing practice has to be built right into the science for it to “click.”
I try to have a lesson in (nearly) every unit that somehow has kids graph data related to the topic. I have created tons of these (you can search my store for “graphing” to see everything I have for graphing practice), but these are my personal favorites…
At this point, I’ve developed so many graphing activities to go along with my science lessons that I’ve been able to bundle them together by science strand.
Each of the bundles below will give you some easy, done-for-you ways to incorporate content-based graphing across your curriculum.
You can SAVE BIG $$ with these content-based graphing bundles!
Because I’m always trying to teach graphing in science, I came up with a bit of a fun way to sneak in graphing practice – holiday themes!
Students are given holiday-related data and use it to create line graphs, bar graphs, and pie charts.
Graph topics include:
And a nice feature of these activities is that they are differentiated. Two versions are provided. Version One has the axes of the graphs pre-labeled with intervals and labels, and Version Two provides blank graphs and the students must label the axes and add integers themselves.
📈 I’m not going to say that my students are perfect little graphers now, but they’re… better! And we’re always working on it!
If you’re also looking to up the graphing practice, I hope you’ve grabbed some of these done-for-you ways to do it.
But if you don’t see a topic you need a graphing activity for, reach out, and maybe I’ll work on it next!
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