Graphing with Glyphs

Sometimes I think that teachers believe a glyph is just a fun activity, but in reality glyphs are a non-standard way of graphing a variety of information to tell a story. It is a flexible data representation tool that uses symbols to represent different data.

Glyphs are an innovative instrument that shows several pieces of data at once and requires a legend/key to understand the glyph. The creation of glyphs requires problem solving, communication, and data organization.

Remember coloring pages where you had to color in each of the numbers or letters using a key to color certain areas or coloring books that were filled with color-by-numbers?  Believe it or not, these pages were a type of glyph. 

Bunny Glyph with Questions

For Easter I have created a bunny glyph. Not only is it a type of graph, but it is also an excellent activity for reading and following directions.  Students finish a rabbit using eight specific categories. At the end of the activity is a completed bunny glyph which the students are to "read" and answer the questions. Reading the completed glyph and interpreting the information represented is a skill that requires deeper thinking by the student.  Students must be able to analyze the information presented in visual form.  A glyph such as this one is very appropriate to use in the data management strand of mathematics.
 

If you are interested, just click under the resource cover page.