Making Graphs on Excel

In order to cover the standard below while integrating higher DOK, I decided to teach students how to create their own graphs using excel. For those of you who have never created graphs on excel, it is fairly simple to do and can be customized in many ways. After students created their own graphs, they copied their graphs over to publisher and created brochures. The students really enjoyed snapping pictures of themselves for the cover! 

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.3.MD.B.3
Draw a scaled picture graph and a scaled bar graph to represent a data set with several categories. Solve one- and two-step “how many more” and “how many less” problems using information presented in scaled bar graphs. For example, draw a bar graph in which each square in the bar graph might represent 5 pets.

Bar Graph

I’m just going to go over some basics to make a simple bar graph and picture graph. First, have some sort of data ready to input into your tables. I recommend organizing your data the way I did below into two columns.

Next, highlight column A and B. Click on the “insert” tab and click on the bar graph picture. You will have a few options to choose from (vertical, horizontal, etc).

Picture Graph

If you want to create a picture graph, you will first need to search for a clip art and save it onto your computer. There are tons of cute options to choose from online.

Next, double click on the bars and you should get a window that pops up on the right.

Then, you will click “fill” -> “picture or texture fill” -> “file” and open the clipart ->”stack and scale width”

You can choose to put it “units”. For example, two students equals 1 cupcake would be “2 units”

You can double click “number of students” to change the title.

Lastly, click on the “design” tab and “add chart elements” to add some vertical and horizontal headers.

Finally, you want to add a legend which you can also find under “add chart elements”. You will notice that by default, it will be titled whatever you put in column B. In order to change this, you will need to click on cell where the title is (cell B1) and type:

= “=2 students”

Line Plot

Creating a line plot is very similar. Instead of creating a horizontal bar graph, create a vertical bar graph. Download clip art of “x” and follow the steps for creating a picture graph.

Tally Table

The tally table is a little different because I manually created the table and put the tallys in myself. After creating a two column table, I just darkened the borders around the table. Since there is no default tally font, I had to download a free tally font online. If you search “tally font” on google, you should get a few.

In order to make this easier, I plan on making a one page instructional page you can download. Check back again!