One Year's Temperatures

Many of the decisions made in today's world are dependent on the collection and tabulation of great amounts of data.  And trends in data can often be seen by graphing, a skill which too many children lack.  In the sciences especially, where the correct analysis of data leads to new discoveries that can potentially impact the world, graphing is one of many tools that scientist need.  And because I'm a very math and science minded person, it's important to me to teach my children how to read and create graphs that relate one quanitity to another. So we've begun a project called "One Year's Temperatures".  Here's how it works:

I printed out a graph with temperatures ranging from 0 to 96 degrees Fahrenheit marked every 2 degrees on the vertical axis and the days of the month (1 - 31) on the horizontal axis.  It uses 2 pages in landscape mode, taped together to form one graph.  This hangs on the wall in our Calendar section of the room.

Each day, Angie checks a Weather Channel page ( which you can find for your town by Googling "yesterday's weather yourtownnameandstatehere".  It'll be similar to this link:  http://www.weather.com/weather/pastweather/90210 ) for the previous day's high and low temperatures.  With a red marker, she marks the high temperature and connects it to the previous day's data point with a line.  With a blue marker, she marks the low temperature and connects it ot the previous day's data point with a line. 

Now, we have the kind of line graph that is found so prevalently in stock charts and other time valued data graphs. 

What's wonderful is that she's beginning to understand the idea of a coordinate system and is looking at the graph from an analytical point of view.  For intance, when the temperature plummeted 24 degrees overnight, Angie declared, "Wow, Mommy, do you see that!?!" as she drew the line.  She imeediately understood that the steepness and downward slant of the line indicated a tremendous drop compared, especially, to the relatively minute changes we'd been seeing over the last few days.  She has now related slope of a line with rate of change and direction of slant with increasing or decreasing behavior.  These are Algebra 1 topics, folks.  And my 7 year old (and yours too) can understand them because she's seeing them daily.

Our plan is to complete a temperature chart for each month and string them altogether on the longest wall in our house.  And then, as we gaze at the entire assemblage, we'll mark the changes of the seasons and remark on the cyclic nature of temperatures.  We may even take a single day and graph the temperatures hourly to see how it compares to the yearly one, getting in a discussion of similarity and fractals at the same time!  (Note:  Angie is also already noticing how the monthly charts are similar even though the temperatures are  a bit lower than last month's.)

Oh how I love math!