Weather Graph Data

Task

Materials

• Completed monthly weather recording sheet

• Crayons
• Sentence strips with frames (see below)
• Student worksheet

Actions

• Every day for a month the students record the weather by shading in an appropriate box on the recording sheet (attached).
• At the completion of a month of school, the teacher projects the completed recording sheet using a document projector (if working with the whole class) or shows it to the students (if working in a small group setting).
• The teacher asks the students to count how many days in the month each type of weather occurred, writing the number by the type of weather.

• The teacher or another student asks questions like these:

  • How many rainy days did we have this month?
  • How many more rainy days did we have than sunny days?
  • How many days did we record the weather?

  Students compose answers to the questions using sentence frames like these:

  • In September there were ___ ______ days
  • There were ___ more ________ days than ________ days
  • There were ___ fewer _________ days than _______ days
  • We recorded ____ days of weather altogether.

  Both numbers and types of weather are used to fill in the blanks. Students pair up and share an idea for each sentence frame; then the teacher chooses a student to fill in one of the frames orally, while it is recorded onto the sentence frame.

• The students copy the data from the recording sheet onto their worksheet to create their own graph. The teacher may need to model this for the students the first time they do it.
• The students choose a sentence based on the completed frames to match each of the weather pictures given. So, for the sunny picture a student could write, "There were 5 more sunny days than rainy days," or "There were 12 sunny days in September." The frame of "We recorded ___ days of weather altogether" could be stated orally, or added at the bottom of the recording sheet to be filled in. The teacher may need to model this for the students the first time they do it.

IM Commentary

The purpose of this task is for students to represent and interpret weather data, as well as answer questions about the data they have recorded. Teachers could modify this task to include the most common weather in their local area.

This is a task that uses an activity that is most likely very familiar to the students and builds upon it in increasingly complex ways. Early in the year, simple frames can be presented, just asking how many data points are in each category. As the students' facility in interpreting data increases, they can use the frames asking how many more or fewer days had weather in one category as compared with another (1.MD.4).

This task includes some reading and writing. If the teacher wants the task to focus solely on mathematics, the questions/statements can be completed orally only. If some students need extra support in writing, sentence frames may be printed onto the recording sheet for them ahead of time, eliminating much of the writing portion of the task.

There is no single solution to this task, as the solutions are based upon the data collected for the month and sentence frames utilized by the teacher and the students.

Attached Resources

Monthly weather recording sheet (PDF)

Student worksheet p. 1 (PDF)

Student worksheet p. 2 (PDF)

Solution