Narrative of a Line Graph activity in a Kansas ABE/preGED classroom

Resource:  EMPower’s Many Points Make a Point, Data and Graphs:  Lesson 5—Sketch This

This was the second day of a new session. New students would join returning students. I would be getting the “feel” of the group and would have to be flexible as I gauged which activities to select and the time given for whole group, pair, or solo work. …On the first day we had done a variety of introductory activities to explore learning preferences. The majority of the new students had shown that they were multi-modal with a slight preference to read/write, but also were kinesthetic. So with the entire group I knew I would want to be multi-modal in presentation and in activities. I found that the EMPower lessons lent themselves to that very easily—times for visual display and reading, times of oral input and discussion, and time for a student’s own creating. 

What was planned and why

1. Students will sketch a line graph based on a narrative.
2. Students will draw a line graph on graph paper based on a narrative, labeling axes and following a scale along each axis.
3. Students will demonstrate an understanding of how the shape of a line provides information about what is happening over time.
4. Students will compose a short narrative to fit the shape of a given line graph using vocabulary that describes change.

All of these students are studying to prepare for the GED tests. Besides the math test that does include line graphs, the science and social studies tests also contain many kinds of graphs. I hope that students’ confidence and performance will increase with more practice working with any kind of graph. Many of my students are looking at careers in nursing or business. These areas rely heavily on organizing data and relating information. Being able to write a good narrative of an event over the passage of time is a necessary skill. Making a simple sketch of the event that follows the flow can assist in this writing. Building a good descriptive vocabulary facilitates accurate communication.

The CASAS math standards (used in Kansas) look for students to extract information from line graphs, to make generalizations about data, to create graphs, and to identify trends. The objectives of this lesson do tie to those CASAS standards.