Big Foot Bar Graph

Feet come in all different sizes. Find out just how wide the range can be in your age range while exercising your graphing skills.

• 1.

  Read and enjoy books with a foot theme such as Teri Daniels’ "The Feet in the Gym" and Gary Soto’s "If the Shoe Fits." To find out more about footwear, read Charlotte and David Yue’s "Shoes: Their History in Words and Pictures."

• 2.

  What size are your shoes? Work in teams to survey children in your grade to gather data about the range of shoes sizes. Use personal dry-erase boards to gather information. Down the left side use Crayola Dry Erase Markers to write all the possible shoe sizes you might find. Each shoe size can be represented by a different color.

• 3.

  Ask each student the same question: "What is your shoe size?" If they don’t know, invite them to remove a shoe to look. Mark each person’s shoe size with a tally mark.

• 4.

  Turn your information into a bar graph on a large dry-erase board. Write the title of your bar graph at the top. Indicate the shoe sizes on the left side, drawing different colorful shoes with a size on each one. Across the bottom create a number line to indicate how many students had each shoe size.

• 5.

  Draw a different colored bar from each shoe across to meet the number of students with that shoe size. Now everyone can see at a glance the whole range of shoe sizes. Which shoe size is most common? How many have tiny feet? How many kids have "Big Foot" s

Benefits

• Students gather information about shoe sizes of students in the same grade.
• Students create bar graphs to demonstrate data collected.
• Students analyze information in a bar graph.

Adaptations

• Small teams could survey different grade levels, teachers, or residents of senior communities, for example.
• Find out more about how shoes are constructed and how sizes are determined. Gather information from athletic shoe companies about the technology and medical information needed to create cutting-edge shoes for runners, basketball players, and hikers.
• Create different kinds of graphs using dry-erase markers and the topic of shoes. You and a partner could come up with a shoe-related question and sample group to survey, such as kind or color of shoes or brands worn by students, teenagers shopping at the mall, or kids playing soccer. Choose which kind of graph is best to display your findings: pie chart, line graph, bar graph, or pictograph.
• Assessment: Observe students gathering data. Evaluate whether data gathered matches the bar graph. Use this lesson prior to assigning partner or individual graphing projects for individual assessment.