Graphing with M&M's

One of the really cool things about math is that I can represent what I have as a data set, and I can show people what I have with cool things like graphs. A pictograph is a great way that I can  represent my data, and today my data is going to be M&M’s! I have a bag on M&M’s here and I need to figure out how many of each color I have! I have my pictograph set up with a few important pieces already written down, but I’m going to need you guys to help me figure out what I’ve got! 

I call on a student to help me sort them, another student count them and another student to record on a white board. I do this to draw more students into the learning instead of allowing only 1 student to participate.

I’m going to tally up what I have so that I know how many total things I’ve got in my data set before I start my graphing work.  There are many ways that I can choose to show what I have with a pictograph, and what I choose might be different from what you choose!

Ok now that I have all of my data, I am going to set up my pictograph. I am going to have it go from side to side, but you can also choose to have it go up and down. And I’m going to use a smiley face to represent my amounts. I think I’ll make each smiley face worth 2 M&M’s. It’s important for me to put that here so that anyone reading my graph knows what I mean by a smiley face! What would have of a smiley face equal? (student responses). That’s right.

I want all of you to use a white board to write down how many smiley faces I need for each color, like this (white board example). Great, I’ll set that up now. 

You will be working with a partner to count your data, tally up what you have and then each of you will create your own pictograph using your data. I want each partner to choose a different way to represent what they have so that we can see our data graphed in as many ways as possible!   

Here I emphasize MP4 and for students to model their unique data set of M&M’s and to encourage each student that even with the same bag of candy they can each find their own unique way to graph it. 

Now who would like to share their pictograph with us? Why did you choose to represent your data in that way?

Here I choose a few students to share out their work and we celebrate each students work.