The Lunchroom Project: A Long-Term Investigative Study

Abstract

From the time they first enter school, children learn to collect information and present it graphically. In most early childhood classrooms, at some point during the year, children are polled on their favorite ice-cream flavors, pets, or colors; and in many schools, graphs of “how our class gets to school” show neat rows of buses, cars, and walking feet. As they progress through the grades, children are often asked to conduct their polls individually and to make up questions that their classmates can answer using their bar graphs or pictographs. Thoughtful teachers often ask their students to make predictions before they gather information and to write a paragraph or two summarizing their results.