Gaga For Graphs

Graphing is a topic covered in our first grade curriculum, and is considered to be a high-quality mathematical concept for 4-6 year old children. Below are three important reasons to include graphing in early childhood classrooms.

• Teachers can enhance children’s interest in mathematics by creating graphs about familiar routines and classroom events.
• Teachers can emphasize the pervasiveness of graphs and mathematics in the world by integrating their use across subject fields such as science, visual arts, technology, engineering, social studies, and language arts.
• Graphing provides a meaningful opportunity for children to represent and communicate important mathematical relationships. Some of these relationships include equality, inequality (more/less), and the associative property in addition. This property, also referred to as a “grouping property,”states that a change in order in the grouping of three or more addends does not change the sum: a + (b + c) = (a + b) + c.

 Most importantly, graphs enable children to make their mathematical thinking visible.