Chart the Animal Speeds in Water

As a teacher I became concerned that we were not giving students enough examples of bar charts, line charts, and pie charts. In the last few years I was developing many more lessons that gave students ways to use data to create charts. One lesson that I used was a lesson on the speeds of animals in water. I also had similar lessons on animal speeds on land and in the air. In the graphic you can see how this lesson is set up on a template for many types of lessons.

The template I use has a place for the student name, date, subject, class period and objective. On the far right there is a column of numbers going from one to forty five. This corresponds to 45 days in a marking period. Right next to that column there is a column that is headed with the word "Points". Typically I would value every template page at a possible 10 points. Everything a student needs to do this lesson is on this page. This makes this an assignment that could be used for "bell work" as students enter the room or for homework as students leave the room. If this was the 7th day of the marking period I would have the students highlight the number 7 in the # column. I would have them cut up the page to the point at the lower right corner of the 7 number segment. This would leave all the other numbers but would remove part of the blank segments for "points". In theory as I collected work from this student all the day 7 work from this student would have a similar highlight and cut off section of the point column. This would in theory allow you to grade their papers and put the grade in the appropriate point segment. If all the pages handed out were placed in numerical day order, you could go downward from the 1 segment to the 45th segment and add up all the points for a total possible of 450 points.

I never fully implemented this process, but did use in generally. It required a lot of paper and a lot of cutting. This would work better with all of the photocopy work and cutting work completed in advance. It was important to try this with classes however so that the problems with the process could be identified. In any case, the purpose of this lesson was to work with animal speeds in water.

One example was given to students, the sailfish. All the data was given at the bottom below the chart. The Sea Horse had a speed of 0.001 mph which is so low several students asked how to represent that on the chart. I told them all they could do is draw a narrow colored line immediately after the 0 point. In the example of the sailfish I put the bar on top of the line. When I first made this template I had the bar splitting the line and this did not work as well because student seemed to get more confused. I had students use different colors for different animals when making the bar, this seemed to help. This lesson might be even better if there was a line or arrow from the animal names to the edge of the chart where the students would draw the bar. There was also one part on the chart where they could add another sea animal if they could do some research on that animal and the maximum speed it could reach in water.

At the bottom of the page there is a "Grading Rubric". Grading rubrics are becoming more popular in college classes and are often part of the lesson planning process in the section of a lesson on "assessment". The idea is that the use of grading rubrics would make grading more uniform and fair. It is also much harder for a student to say they should not get points taken off if they do not head their paper properly when the rubric is printed at the bottom of "every" lesson.

Unfortunately I started using this template page later in my career as a teacher and so it now takes time to convert from older lesson plans over to this new template format. Another problem is that the center section that you have available for the actual lesson is greatly reduced to allow you to get everything else on the page. The good point of this is that it creates more focus on the center and on the topic.

Some students did great charts, while others were still sloppy. When you save student work prepared in such a way that if they take any reasonable amount of care they could produce quality work this really identifies students that need a different kind of help. They could be very intelligent, but careless and lazy. When parents look at their work on a lesson sheet like this, they often realize they have much more work to do as a parent motivating their child at home. For the teacher however, it means you have to work on the child's self confidence, their determination, their interest and their application of effort. They also realize that on such a lesson their lack of effort really shows up clearly.

There is an underlying concept in these lesson sheets and handouts. The better you can make the handout, the harder it is for them to "fudge" effort. If I have students that do this lesson really poorly I will give them another blank and their first attempt to take home and complete properly. I tell them that I will try to call their parents and tell them I sent this assignment home for them to redo, and I do call. It usually only takes one call and future assignments are completed in a significantly better manner. Ultimately students want to produce quality work and receive praise. We often ask them to do assignments that will emphasize the things they do not do well, like handwriting. measuring etc.

In this lesson they have to be able to "read the data", "draw a line with a ruler and make this line into a bar", and "color the line". Every student could produce quality work. It may seem too easy, but you are just getting started. You can build on these simple tasks.