apple graphing

A concrete first-experience in bar graphing:
APPLES!!!

Earlier in the day, I had gathered an assortment of apples.
Some were from the store,
and some were picked from the trees on the playground
{A few even had bites taken out of them by worms and birds!}
I gave each child an apple,
and asked them to think of different ways we could sort them.
When a child thought of a way,
I wrote it down on strips of paper.
Then, each child put his or her apple on the chart
above the appropriate label.
We counted and made lots of observations...
it was really fun!

Some of the ways we sorted the apples:
color {red, green, red and green}
sticker or no sticker
size {small, medium, large}
stem or no stem
shape {sphere-shaped, ovoid-shaped}
bites or no bites

Here's a photo of the blank bar graph I made.
It worked so well, I think I'm going to make a more permanent version
out of poster board or laminated paper.
I wrote the numbers on the left side
and drew lines across to separate the rows.
I cut up several strips of paper to write the labels on;
if you had a laminated graph,
you could write the labels with an erasable marker
and wipe them off when you were done.
Actually, you could to that with the numbers, too,
depending on what scale you wanted to use - 1's, 5's, 10's, etc!

Hmmm... I wonder what we'll graph next?