M&M Graphing Lesson Grand Rapids, MI

After looking through the Intime website, I found a lesson on third graders graphing individual packets of M&M's. They began by doing their own, then combining with a partner and then eventually with a small group. I can see how I can use this in my class. First of all, my kids love food and second we have a program called the Graph Club that would be perfect to use with this lesson. I find that the children are really struggling with graphing and this would be great practice as well as being fun. I was thinking that they could even eventually come up with their own graph, collect the data, graph it, and share it with the class. Maybe this M&M lesson would be a good way to start out and see where the kids would take it. It would be really interesting to do a BIG bag as a class. I also have an M&M man in my class that when the kids are good they get to shake his hand. The number of M&M's vary on the shake so it would be great to keep track of how many they get in each shake and graph that information. After all, that is the one thing they want to know after someone shakes his hand-"how many did you get?"