Study of Names

By Ellen Dean

Graphs are a way of communicating the relation between two variable quantities measured along a pair of axes at right angles. There are several different types of graphs and they typically are used to visually explain information that may be difficult to understand through words alone. In this activity, your child will get to practice creating a bar graph and pictorial graph after gathering data about the names of her friends. It's a fun way to begin learning the many uses of graphs for presentations and mathematics.

What You Need:

• White paper
• Markers

What You Do:

1. Have your child divide her piece of paper in half using the marker. In one section write the heading "Bar Graph." In the other section write "Pictorial Graph."
2. Under each heading ask her to write the question: How long is your first name?
3. Ask her to draw a pair of axes at right angles in each square. They will look like the bottom line and left line of a square, meeting in the corner.
4. The first section should contain the bar graph, have her write numbers 1–10 along the bottom and the side. The side will have the 10 at the top and the 1 where the axis meets at the bottom. Then, on the left side have her write, "Number of Friends" and on the bottom have her write, "Number of Letters."
5. On a separate sheet of paper, encourage her to write out up to 20 names of her friends and count how many letters there are in each of their names.
6. To begin the bar graph, ask her how many friends have names that only contain 1 letter?  If the answer is "0", she should leave that column alone. If she has 3 friends with 4-letter names, then she will create a bar to represent that fact and color it in. Have her repeat this process until she's created bars for each letter amount.
7. The pictorial graph uses individual symbols instead of bars to represent amounts. Have your child write numbers to represent the amount of letters in each of her friend's names along the y-axis, starting with 1 on the top and create long horizontal lines in between each number that extend out from the y-axis side. Then make one vertical line just after the numbers along the y-axis. (Our chart had 8 letters as being the longest first name.) At the top of the graph have her write, "Number of Students."
8. Have her choose a symbol or picture to represent each friend. (We used stars.) To conserve space, she can create a key at the bottom of the graph to indicate how many people each symbol represents. For example, one star can equal 2 people. Therefore, if there are only 3 people with 4 letters in their name, one full star and one half star would be the correct representation of how many of her friends have 4-letter names.
9. Ask her to complete her pictorial graph by drawing the right number of symbols in each row.