The purpose of the discussion about this graph is
twofold. One is to give students practice in reading
graphs flexibly and thoughtfully. Students need to be
able to think about and reflect upon the data they
read in graphs, to reason about it, and relate it to
what they already know. The second purpose is
specific to this lesson, i.e., to build students' familiarity
and comfort level with addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division situations.
Focus the discussion of the graph on the story it
tells. Use questions like those below or questions of
your own.
- What can you tell me about our class's pets by looking at our graph?
- What story does it tell? (Possible response: More
students have _____ than _____ . Only _____ people
have fish.)
- How many students have _____ ?
- What is the most common pet in the class?
- What is the least common pet in the class?
- How many more students have dogs than cats?
- How many students have _____ and _____ altogether?
How did you find the answer?
- Our data shows that _____ students have birds as
pets. If each of these students has _____ birds,
how many birds will there be in all? What strategies
can you use to figure this out? How can you
write the number sentence? (Possible response:
repeated addition e.g., 3 + 3 + 3 + …)
- Suppose that everyone who has a dog owns only
one. The owners want to buy two new dishes for
their dogs. How many new dishes would that be?
What strategies could you use for this problem?
(Possible response: doubling)
- _____ students have cats as pets. Suppose there
are [choose a multiple of the first number] cats
and everyone owns the same number of cats. How
many cats does each person have? How do you
know?
- If a new student joined our class tomorrow, what
kind of pet do you think he or she might have?
Why do you think so?
- If every student had two lizards as pets, how many
lizards would that be? What strategies can we use
to find out? (Possible responses: skip counting by
twos, doubling)
