Summer Bar Graph

What You Need:

• Notebook
• Pen or pencil
• Crayons

What You Do:

1. In preparation for this activity, keep a small notebook at your child’s bedside. Before bed each night, ask her to list what she’s done that day, from swimming in the pool to singing along with the radio -- anything and everything that she feels worthy of remembering. Do this for one week.
2. When the week is over, help her total up the various activities.
3. Have her draw the axes for a simple bar graph. Along the bottom axis, help her list the activities. Now number the side axis. Make sure the numbering goes high enough to count whatever activity she did the most.
4. How many times did she do the first activity? Have her draw a bar for that on the graph that reaches to the appropriate number. Repeat, using a different color, for each activity.
5. Now that she has made the graph, help her understand what it shows by asking her which activity she did the most, the least and if any were done with the same frequency. Which activity does she wish had the tallest bar? 

A possible variation of this activity is to create a chore bar graph. Whenever your child completes her chores, she can fill in the bar graph. You can tell her that when the bar reaches high enough, she'll get to do another one of her fun summer activities. Now that's some tangible motivation for getting chores done!