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Friday, November 18, 2022

Info-Graph Your Thanksgiving Meal!

If you want to keep track of how the seasons change, your favorite lunches, or keep track of all the food you eat at Thanksgiving (and even the time it takes to make it), all you need is a pencil and a scrap of paper. 

But if you want to impress your neighbor with the numbers, you might need a bit more – a way to share your information so people can understand it in a glance. And that way is through infographics ~ a combination of math, art, and communication. To explain your Thanksgiving meal you might want to use a time line to show how long it took to prepare the food. And you’ll definitely need a pie graph to compare the kinds of pies you ate!

Here are two books that show and tell how to make infographics. They might even inspire kids to keep track of the interesting (and even mundane) things in their lives.


Life Log: Track Your Life with Infographic Activities Diary 
by Lea Redmond; illus. by Andrea Tsurumi
96 pages; ages 8-12
Chronicle Books, 2022 

Life Log is a guided workbook for infographic exploration. It opens with an introduction to the basics: what infographics is, how a key works, and the lowdown on facts and data. There are pie charts, rainbow charts, timelines, and lots of great questions. All the book asks is for curious kids to bring a bunch of colored pencils and a willingness to visualize information in a new way. 


My favorites: tracking a tree, how long a pencil lasts, and a month of insect encounters. This book is a great way to jump into creating graphs and charts.

Or you could keep track of how regularly you "ate the rainbow" of vegetables and fruits suggested in daily servings.




Show and Tell! Great Graphs and Smart Charts: An Introduction to Infographics 
by Stuart J. Murphy; illus. by Teresa Bellón    
48 pages; ages 7-10
‎Charlesbridge, 2022  

Bar graphs, line graphs, pictographs, and pie charts can show a lot of information in a single glance. But which do you use, and when? Let’s say you want to find out more about lunchroom food. If you want to know what meals kids like the most, you could conduct a survey and display the results in a bar graph. If you wanted to compare the number of entrees served during a lunch period, you might draw a pie graph. (yes, you can create pie alamode graphs if you really want to) This book serves well as an introduction to charts and graphs, and ends with a list of things kids can use infographic techniques to explore.



Thanks for dropping by today. On Monday we'll be hanging out at Marvelous Middle Grade Monday with other  bloggers. It's over at Greg Pattridge's blog, Always in the Middle, so hop over to see what other people are reading. Review copies provided by the publishers.


6 comments:

  1. I enjoy these type of books so thanks for featuring them on MMGM this week. Great source for kids, too!

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  2. I think these books could also be used in the classroom. I'm new to Infographics and from what you shared it sounds like a fun and interesting way to track things in your life in a more creative way. Thanks for sharing!

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  3. I've seen Infographics around. Thanks for sharing some useful ways to use them.

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  4. Enjoyed these reviews - Thank you. - Lou

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  5. I've always been a big fan of infographics. I wish I had had these books when I was young. They both look very inviting. Thanks for the reviews.

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  6. These sound like they would be a super resource for schools to help children get to grips with graphs. We use a lot of infographics in work so I'm a bit swamped by them, but this sounds a fun way to view them! Thanks for sharing!

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