Candy heart bar graph

     Today, in honor of valentines day, the kindergartners did a candy heart bar graph.  First, the students had to sort their box of candy hearts by color.  Then, the students had to count each color and they would put one x in each box for each candy heart they counted.  These x's each went into a different column for each color of hearts.  After they finished with the x's, the student had to color in the boxes with the color crayon that the candy heart was, completing their bar graph.
      I think this math lesson provided the students with a purpose for counting. Each student got to individually count their hearts and then count the x's as they numbered off the column with how many candy hearts that they had.  This is one of the first times I've seen them practice making some kind of graph, which I thought went really well. The students seemed to understand that the tallest column meant that was what color had the most candy hearts, and the shortest column represented the color with the fewest candy hearts.  After the students finished, the students presented to the rest of the class and my mentor probed them with questions such as, "Which color did you have the fewest/the most of?" She also explained to the students the idea of two things being "equal," since many of the students had colors that had the same amount of candy hearts. The majority of the students were able to complete this activity, so in the future, I might have the students do more of these types of graphs, but maybe without the use of counters or tangible items so I could test if they understand that the bars represent objects, and that you can just use the number of the objects to chart the graph.