22 Sep 2025

The Power of Slow Reveal Graphs

I asked students, “What do you notice? What do you wonder?” I gave them an opportunity to turn-and-talk before sharing with the whole class.

Students were fascinated by the colors. “There’s lots of orange, some teal, and some purple.”

“The teal and purple are always whole,” another student pointed out, drawing us in deeper. I asked her to clarify. “Sometimes, the orange people are cut in half.”

Students speculated that maybe those half-figures represented someone sick or dead. Other students shared ideas about how the rows increased in size, steadily increasing like steps before a giant increase for the last row.

We annotated all of these ideas on the interactive whiteboard.Students quickly started revising their thinking about the half-icons. “Since it’s about deaths, maybe the half means one person,” one student suggested. “Or maybe 10.” Students reasoned about the scale. If the half-icon represented one person, then a whole icon represented two people. If the half-icon represented five people, then the whole icon represented 10. But did those numbers make sense? And what did each row represent?