M&M's

  I brought this book in case I needed to calm or distract a child.  Usually when M&M's are mentioned all attenion is focused on that.  Well I didn't need it for the plane but Sydney discovered it during one of our 4 hour night time parties.  My inner teacher surfaced and I decided it was about time Scott made a graph.

First we sorted.  Scott's face is great!  He's holding half an M&M and is wondering what to do with that one.

I told him he could eat it.  My mistake.  After that he tried to convince me that half the M&M's had flaws and were not graph worthy.  Therefore he figured he should just eat it.

Scott sorted in piles much like the book which he kept referencing.

Sydney sorted hers into neat little rows.  I helped her along a bit because I didn't think her attention span would last through the sorting of each M&M into it's appropriate row.

 Next the kids colored the M&M colors onto their graph.

Then they graphed.  

Sydney did very well and knew what to do by watching Scott but again I helped her because we just weren't going to get through all the M&M's.

Finally we counted.

Scott was quite pleased to see that his bag of M&M's had a lot of brown just like the one in the book.

Of course you can't make a graph of M&M's and not eat any so Scott had a few and the rest met their fate as cookies!

Before the cookies were made, Scott wanted one more M&M so I told him to pick his favorite color.  He chose orange.  He then asked me if I wanted my favorite color and he said we had to save daddy's favorite color.  Thus the idea to poll other family members for their favorite color M&M (from this bag) and graph those results, was born.

Today we graphed and this time I showed Scott how to draw the lines on the graph using a straight edge.  He attempted to write the total votes for each color which you can see in pencil.  

He wanted to be very sure that his graph would not fall off the fridge. 

I think 14 magnets should just about do it!