I love charting things. Don’t ask me why, it’s just one of my passions. And as is so often the case, my enthusiasm has become contagious. My kids really enjoy keeping track of things by making different kinds of charts.
Recently, my son expressed an interest in keeping a record of July’s weather. Of course, there are tons of ways to go about this!
Here’s what we did…
First we cut adding machine tape into equal lengths and taped it onto our slider. Next we decided what categories we wanted (we went with sunny, cloudy, and rainy) and labeled each strip with one of the categories. Each day, we decorated a 2×2 sticky note with that day’s weather, and stuck it on the appropriate strip. What’s neat about this is that if you put the sticky notes directly above one another, you automatically create a pretty accurate bar graph.
When August rolled around, we thought it would be cool to compare the weather in July to the weather in August. We kept the July strips up, but moved them apart. Then, next to each strip we taped up a new blank strip, and voila, now our bar graph showed which month “won” for each kind of weather.
Incidentally, August was WAY more rainy than July. We’re trying to figure out if we should take that into account as we plan next summer’s vacations. What do you think?