Fall Math Fun

Fall Math Fun 

This is a little project I did with Brother. I used the falling Autumn leaves to teach him tally marks and displaying data on a bar graph. It was a really fun project and he totally rocked it. So proud of my little guy! 

The night before I did some prep: I created the bar graph and decorated a sheet of paper to use for keeping track of our data collection. 

The next morning, on our way to school, we took notice of all the leaves changing color. I led the olders to the question of: What fall color is most common for the leaves in our neighborhood?

Our guesses were red and brown.

After we dropped Big Sister off at school, we used our walk home to begin data collecting to see if any of our hypotheses were correct. We decided to collect 30 leaves. We took only a few samples whenever we came across a big collection of fallen leaves. 

In order to keep track of how many leaves we had collected, we used tally marks. This is a lesson we have revisited more than once and this was a perfect way to apply it. Brother still needs lots of support when counting by 5's but who cares. He will totally get it soon enough.  :) 

Once we had all of our data collected, it was time to sort. Brother made piles of each color.  We then talked about the parts of the graph and showed him a sample of how to put information on a bar graph. 

Then my little mathematician went to task and graphed all the information he had collected. I lent him support for the taller bars but he did most of the work, and accurately even! 

The end result, as you saw above, is this! We could easily tell that our guesses of red and brown were correct and we noticed that we just don't seem to have any orange leaves in our neighborhood. Brother thought this was really fun and I could tell he felt very accomplished once he saw his finished project. 

This is an easy project to prep and a lot of fun for your little ones. If you decide to give it a try, I hope you will let us know which fall colors are most popular in your neighborhood!

Thank you for reading!!!