Teaching your kids about data

by Lindsay Lamb

Recently, I read a great article in the New York Times, Turn Your Demanding Child Into a Productive Co-Worker. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, I have taken on a majority of childcare responsibilities for my two children during the pandemic. Needless to say, the first few sentences of Michaeleen Doucleff’s article resonated with me: “At 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, I lock myself in our bedroom, slide down the back of the door and begin to cry. “But Mama, but Mama,” my 4-year-old daughter screams from the hallway.”

I found a kindred spirit. I had to read on.

After venting about her current situation (which we all need to do, regardless of whether or not we have young children to look over right now), Doucleff went on to describe how in her work she has observed families from cooperative cultures sharing work with children. She suggested that we stop endlessly entertaining our children (which is exhausting), and instead show them our work and share in the process with them.

Easier said than done.

How could I share my work with my kids?

I could teach Hannah (who is 5) to sit calmly next to me and “work,” but I seriously doubt I could get my destructive Godzilla-esque 20-moth old to sit calmly while I write without him a) destroying my computer, b) destroying whatever Hannah was working on, or c) injuring himself.

After pondering a bit, I came up with an idea that would both use data and get the kids outside.

Me: “Hey Hannah, do you want to do a data gathering nature walk? At the end we can make a graph and show Daddy what we found!”

Hannah: “YES!!!”

Hayes: “Mama!!! Outside, outside!!!”

Hannah and I discussed what we would search for on our nature walk. I explained that we would count how many of each thing we saw during our walk and use that information, or data, to make a picture.

Me: “What things do you think we might see on our nature walk?”

Hannah: “Rabbits!”

Me: “That would be really cool if we saw a rabbit! What is something that you know we will see just in case we don’t see a rabbit?”

Hannah: “Birds, maybe a cardinal, and squirrels! Oh, and a blue jay.”

Me: “What would Hayes like to see?”

Hannah and I: “TRAINS!”

Me: “Yes, let’s add trains.”

Hannah: “And butterflies.”

I loaded up the kids in the double-wide stroller, and gathered crayons, a notebook, an envelope in which to carry the crayons and notebook, and snacks (you always need snacks). Ten hours later (well, maybe 20 minutes), we hit the trail for our fun-filled adventure. Since the weather was nice, I decided to run. Because I felt like a pack mule, I was more than happy to stop whenever Hannah excitedly screamed that she saw something from her list.

Like any good scientist conducting an observational field study, Hannah added some animals to her list based on what we saw during our run (and what she wanted me to run by). For example, we saw a parrot fly by, so we added parrot to the list. She also realized that she forgot to add cats, so we added cats. Then she wanted to go by the house with goats in our neighborhood, so we added goats to the list.

To keep a record of what she saw, she created a list of each animal (or train or butterfly) and added a check (also in a box) next to each animal. This way she could not only keep track of what she saw, but also how many of each animal (or train or butterfly) she saw during our walk. Here is her completed check list:

In case you can’t read her handwriting (though I did help her a bit), we searched for rabbits, cardinals, squirrels, butterflies, trains, blue jays, cats, parrots, and goats.

Hannah had so much fun seeing each item and adding a check box to her list. It turned our daily run on the same streets into a new adventure. We saw things we had never seen before and took the time to really explore our neighborhood.

When we got home, she couldn’t wait to make a graph. She ran upstairs and grabbed some construction paper, crayons, markers, and tape.

We sat down at the dining table and got to work. I got out some paper and showed her what a graph of the data we collected could look like. I explained that you can show data in lots of different ways. In the end, she wanted me to make two different bar graphs. She used one graph that I created and gave the other one to Hayes.

I said that a lot of times I use different colors to indicate that it represents a different category of something. With our data, a different color would represent a different animal (or train or butterfly). She started coloring the bars using a color that represented each animal we saw. We added numbers to the bars so you could easily see how many of each animal we saw. Then she decided to draw a picture of each animal next to each bar. This was music to my ears! We have a data viz pro on our hands!

Me: “What did we see the most of?”

Hayes: “Pink! Pink marker!”

Hannah: “Squirrels… and butterflies! I wish we would have seen a rabbit.”

Me: “I know, and maybe next time we will! Hannah, I love your graph. Did you know that graphs have a title, like the title of a book? What do you think the title of your graph should be?”

Hannah: “Today I saw a lot of things in nature, but I didn’t see any rabbits.”

In the end, she made a pretty great one-pager…

Hayes’ creation could use a little help, but he had fun creating it (and seeing TWO TRAINS!) and that is all that matters.

For me, the best part about our data nature walk was talking – albeit abstractly – about what I do in my job and sharing in that experience with my daughter. Maybe it wasn’t exactly what Michaeleen Doucleff had in mind when she wrote her article, but it got us through another day and we all had fun.