When you think of graphing, you probably think back to stale worksheets in your third grade class, or to more complicated parabolas in high school calculus.  Graphing starts out as a very simple concept, one that can and should be explored with preschool children, particularly the four year-olds.  One of my favorite ways to do that is with a Post-it graph. 

The easiest way to start with the concept of graphing is to chart the  number of boys vs number of girls in a group.  It is a clear-cut dichotomy (in preschool anyway :)) .  Start by having the children look around.  Do they think there are more boys or more girls?  In a larger group, this is often harder to do just by looking.  We need to organize the information to make it easier to compare.  Show your prepared chart, with a grid divided between boys and girls.  Explain to the children that you will be using this grid to graph how many boys and how many girls are in your class.  Ask each of the girls, one by one, to come up, get a Post-it and place it on the chart above the “Girls” label.  Remind them that each person only gets one sticker, and that when we build a graph, we climb up the chart like a ladder: one sticker per square.  Next, invite the boys to do the same thing. 

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