Animated Step-by-Steps®: Charting

Monday, January 30, 2017

Charting

Whenever possible I try to include an opinion chart in my Animated Step-by-Steps® allowing everyone to state their prediction or democratically decide on a shared direction. Teachers love opinion charts as they provide a functional reason for using math skills and they provide a mini lesson in the democratic process, e.g., ‘According to our chart … 6 friends want to make blue play doh, two friends want to make red and 1 friend, Trevor, voted for his favorite color, green...Which color got the most votes? That's right Jeremy, looks like we are going to make blue play doh." Charts work especially well when using an interactive whiteboard as the pen tools can be used to mark up the large chart.

The opinion chart may take the form of deciding:

what color play doh we will make;
what fruit would you add to ice cream to achieve a particular color of ice cream;
what three Fall colors does each student want for their turkey’s tail.

In Animated Step-by-Step experiments, a page previous to the table chart is designed to elicit open-ended suggestions. These open-ended suggestions are then followed by a chart that has predetermined options … but also includes an ‘other’ column for any creative idea(s) that may have been missed from the previous discussion. Here are two examples derived from the Egg-Cola Experiment and the Fire Experiment.