Above, you can see that this group of children chose their favorite book between “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” and “Panda Bear, Panda Bear.”  Using name cards with the children’s names written carefully across the top, and then a small picture of each child in the corner, children voted by placing their name card under their book choice.

What is good about this?

1.  Children’s names are reinforced with their photographs.  Remember, many children can recognize their own names using a variety of clues, but they may not recognize any of their classmates names.  Using the above technique, all of the children can “read” the data using the photographs as additional support.

2.  The slots for names are evenly spaced.  There is a clear one-to-one correspondence between the cards and the slots.  One card per one slot.  This helps support the children when they count the results. This also means that the children won’t be “fooled” by the votes.  They can easily see which book received more votes.

3.  There are only 2 choices.  Often, teachers are tempted to think that “more is more.”  For children under 3 I believe that choosing between 2 options is entirely appropriate.  You will also find less hemming and hawing when the children make their choices.

4.  The “graph” remains in the classroom.  Children can go and revisit their data set after the activity is over.  Teachers can ask the next day, or the next week, “Who can tell me which book had the most votes?” and children can go over to their data set and revisit the graph and figure it out for themselves.

5.  The books are familiar and recognizable by sight.   The book covers are copied and reduced in size and are completely identifiable to even very young children.

6.  If done well, children can count how many votes each book received.  It is also possible that some children can figure out how many more Brown Bear received than Panda Bear by showing them they can count on from the bottom of the Panda Bear list.  This is very difficult to do, but you may have some children who are ready for this.

Next week, we will look at more graphing examples and get lots of ideas for activities you can do with your own children.

The children in her classroom had been studying Eric Carle for a while, focusing primarily on the Bear books: Brown Bear, Polar Bear, Panda Bear, and Baby Bear. There was evidence of their ongoing exploration in the classroom. Below you can see a chart where the children voted for their favorite bear.

Here you can see another way that the children voted, this time between 2 books.

The teacher used two proven methods for voting both with visual clues that helped the children see which books were favored.  In the first example, the children wrote their names above the books, so it created a graph-like visual, and in the second, they put their name cards in slots below the titles which could easily be counted.

So not only was the exploration filled with mathematics, but the children also discovered the same author wrote versions of this story that could be compared and contrasted.  In Brown Bear – the bear sees.  In Polar Bear the bear hears.  It is the same but different.

My student took it all a step further and created a matching game with images from the story.  She started with images which were exactly the same,and then used images that were the same but different.  She found real images of a frog, and a red bird, a duck and a sheep.  These small changes presented some very interesting challenges for the children because they could identify the images for what they, were but found it very difficult to see that they were the same as the drawn pictures.  Watch the video below to see how the girl passes over the match a couple of times and needs the support of her teacher to find the matching green frog.