Weather Graphs, Missing Vowels and Petals on the Wind

I am amazed at how quickly the boys have been able to pick up on the concept of a block graph; I can't imagine being able to comprehend something like that at their age. But what I anticipated being quite a difficult mathematics task has turned out to be one of the easiest so far.

This is how it worked. Last week, we kept a daily record of the weather, and this week, the boys helped me analyse the results and make up their very first graph to display those results at a glance.

To gather the information, we kept a record of each day's weather by ticking a box to indicate Rain, Sun, Wind or Cloud. Today, exactly one week later, we added up how many ticks each type of weather had received, and turned the results into this simple block graph, pictured below.



After the graph, we continued with last week's work on vowels, mainly playing 'spot the missing vowel' in a variety of simple Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words. This is a board-based activity they seem to be enjoying immensely -- which is just as well, as I've drawn up some 'Missing Vowel' worksheets for them to complete later this week!

They then spent some time playing with the dressing-up box, which led to requests for me to find the 'How to be a Ballet Dancer' DVD. This is them trying to be little petals on the wind ...