Graphing is a skill we practice at least 2-3 times a week in kindergarten to help us represent different kinds of information. Sometimes, we graph the weather, our favorite colors, or our predictions as we start science experiments. Other times, we use graphing to help us make choices about which activity to do first or help us decide which snack to eat!
Each day, three students are chosen to help decide what the weather is like outside. Then, we graph it on our whiteboard. After we have graphed that days weather, we use What's the Weather Puppets to sing about that kind of weather. Connecting our graph to a song and puppet puts a visual with the weather and engages them to sing along! Here, we are singing the "Sunny Song" (sung to the BINGO tune): "There was some weather that had a name and Sunny was the weather, S-U-N-N-Y, S-U-N-N-Y, S-U-N-N-Y, and Sunny was the weather!" Each day’s weather is sung to this tune (except for Partly Cloudy, which is too long!).
When we graph, I like to know what choice each child made, so that I can ask them questions about why they made the choice they did on our graph. The Look It's Me Shaped Clothes Pins are PERFECT for this! Each student decorated a person to "look" like themselves and were able to quickly attach the clothespin to the sticky strip on the back of the foam cutout. 
We used our clothespin people on this graph to show what we think will happen when we grew our Magic Growing Trees. It was easy for my students to clip the clothespins right onto the pockets on the Bar Graph Pocket Chart. Because the cutouts had names on them, I was able to ask my children why they made the choice they did. You can see the pink cards at the bottom show some of the predictions that my students made when I asked them what they thought would happen to the Magic Growing Trees! I used the Colorful Word Strips (which are a PERFECT fit) in the pockets of the Bar Graph Pocket Chart. 
We then poured the "magic solution" on our magic growing trees and waited to see what would happen. After they grew overnight, we checked to see if our predictions were correct are drew them in our Science Notebooks. 
In addition to using the Bar Graph Pocket Chart to graph predictions, we've also used it to get to know each other better and enhance our "All About Me" theme. Included with the Bar Graph Pocket Chart are LOTS of header cards with pre-printed questions on them. There are also numbers, "voting cards" and a big stack of cards that correlate with the header cards to be used in the pockets at the bottom. When I want to make my own header card, I just turn over one of the pre-printed cards and use the back! Twice as many questions for double the graphing! I leave each graph up for a few days so that we can talk about the results as we learn more about graphing. 
