Another way to encourage you child, no matter their age, to learn and practice creating and reading graphs at home is by using technology. There are programs and websites that make learning about graphs fun.
Excel is the most popular graphing program that is used in the business world. Teaching your child the basics of creating a data table and a graph in Excel is a very useful experience. It is a skill that they will be able to use in school and possibly in their future career. Here are some activities to practice with Excel at home for various ages. In addition here are directions that may help you as a parent to brush up on your Excel skills before teaching your child.
There are also games that kids can play to learn about graphs. The BBC education page has a game for upper elementary aged children to practice with their logic skills while creating a graph. In the game, they have to organize students in a class depending on the hints that they provide. In the end, all of the students are placed into a category on the graph based on tallies and frequency. Another game, on Fun Brain, has kids practice coordinate pairs skills. Both of these games require that your child have the background knowledge in order to practice the skills. They are not meant for learning the skills, but designed for practice. Both of the games also have three different difficult levels.
Another graphing website is Kids’ Zone Create a Graph. This website walks your child through creating different graphs including bar, line, area, pie, bubble, and scatter plots. You then enter your data you would like on the graph, the labels for the x and y axis, and then you can preview, print, and save your graph. This is a great website to help kids create graphs for school projects. This site also provides editable examples that can be used as a guide.