Getting to School

If you're like most of us, you've always wanted to know how kindergarteners get to school. Lucky you! Now's your chance to find out--because the kindergarten recently put together a graph showing that information. Voila--!



(You can click on the picture to enlarge it.)

The kids enjoy the drawing, of course (some of them enjoy it quite a lot--I'm very fond of the multicolored, creatively shaped cars at the top of the cars column, along with the 3-wheeled truck on the far right). But it's also a good learning experience for these newly minted K students.

There are the reading-the-graph questions, of course:

*Which way of getting to school was the most common?
*Which was second most common?
*How many children came to school by truck?
*Which way of getting to school was used by 7 children?

And the interpreting-the-graph questions too:

*Suppose we asked the same question tomorrow and made a graph about that. Would the graph look exactly the same? Mostly the same? Not at all the same? Why?
*What if we made a graph showing how people got home? What do you think that would look like? Why?
*Why do you think no one got here on a skateboard? A surfboard? A motorboat?
*Do you think the school needs a bigger parking lot? Why?

But mostly, there's the notion that you can take information and show it in a way that makes it available to everybody who comes along. You can tell, just by looking, that more people in your class come to school by bus than come by van, and that a LOT more come by car than come by truck. You can locate your own name (or your own truck) on the graph and show a friend how you got to school that day. You can find out how a friend arrived. The information will be there today--and tomorrow--and the next day--and it will remain available forever, or at least as long as the teachers choose to hang it in the hall. Knowledge is power, we like to say; and graphs, I believe, are a really good example of that adage.