Fishing and Graphing Game

A photo of a plastic container painted to look like an ocean, fish cards with paperclips attached, a magnetic pole, and a graphing worksheet.

I'm working on graphing with one of my students, and I made this game to go along with the printed worksheets I made (which you can get as a free download here). For the worksheets, you cut out little images of fish, glue them on the graph, and write down how many you have of each kind. The worksheet packet that you download has other activities too, such as interpreting a graph, and coloring in the bars to make the graph (rather than gluing in the fish), so it's really a whole unit on introducing bar graphs.

To play the game, you can put a paperclip on each fish and put them into a container (my student cut out the water for the "ocean" container in the photo). You can put a magnet on a string and a pole (or just use a magnetic pole-thing that I got at AutoZone, like I did), so the student can "fish" and graph the number of fish he or she catches.

For each worksheet, you'll put a few fish of each color listed on the worksheet into the "ocean" container.

The student I made this for loves ocean animals, so we had fun with this activity!

You can download the graphing worksheets here: http://www.positivelyautism.com/downloads/graphingunitocean.pdf