Charty Party Lessons for Middle School: Teach Graphing with the Game

Charty Party Lessons: Turn a Funny Graphing Game into a Middle School Science and Math Unit

Have you seen Charty Party and wondered how to use it to teach graphing in the classroom? The Charty Party: All Ages Edition game from Very Special Games invites players to pair funny descriptions with charts. It's a lively way to get students looking closely at graphs and talking about what they show. For classroom use, choose the All Ages Edition as the original edition contains some cards that are unsuitable for kids.

As a middle school science teacher, I know students need graph practice with reading axes, noticing trends, identifying variables, and explaining their thinking. That’s why I created graphing lessons and activities for Charty Party: a sequence of lessons that helps students build those skills before applying them as they play. Very Special Games has given me permission to sell lessons associated with the game.

Click the image to find these lessons.

What can students learn with Charty Party?

The humor gets students interested in the charts. A graphing lesson gives them a reason to examine the data more carefully. Before choosing a funny match, students can ask:

• Is this a bar graph, line graph, or scatter plot?
• What does each axis represent?
• What are the highest and lowest points?
• What trend do you notice?
• Does one data point stand apart from the others?
• Does the graph support the story someone is telling about it?

Those questions work in middle school science and math, where students need to read graphs, discuss data, and support conclusions with evidence.

Charty Party graphing lessons for grades 6–8

My Charty Party graphing resource contains nine lessons that begin with graphing basics and move into more advanced data interpretation. Students work with bar graphs, line graphs, and scatter plots, then explore topics such as independent and dependent variables, positive and negative trends, outliers, interpolation, extrapolation, statistical questions, data collection, and misleading graphs.

The resource also includes a teacher guide with suggestions for playing Charty Party in class, vocabulary support, a 30-question assessment. The resource includes both printable PDFs and a digital version compatible with Google Slides. You can teach the graphing lessons without owning the game; you’ll need Charty Party: All Ages Edition to add the game activity.

These are sample lessons and assessment questions from the Charty Party lessons.

How I would use Charty Party in a graphing unit

Start by teaching students how to read a graph before asking them to interpret one quickly during a game. Introduce the graph types your students need, practice describing patterns in words, and ask them to point to evidence on the graph for each claim.

Then bring out Charty Party. Choose a graph and an orange card that works with it and show it to the class. Ask students to describe the graph and then explain why that card fits the chart. What feature(s) of the graph supports this card as a good choice? Is the match supported by the data, or is it simply funny? That short discussion turns a game round into useful graph-reading practice.

Afterward, give students another graph with an orange card to interpret in a small group or independently. This helps you see which skills they can apply. Finally, give students a graph and a few orange cards (pre-selected by you, to make sure at least one works with that graph) and have them identify which orange cards work best with that graph. Students can either work in groups to do this, write out their explanation, and/or present their explanation to the class.

Teach graphing skills before playing the Charty Party game by selecting a graph and orange card, as shown, and then discussing it. Teacher Toy Shop's lessons help with teaching these skills.

Try a free bar graph lesson first

If you’d like to see my approach before using the full set of Charty Party lessons, download my free bar graph lesson and worksheets. It introduces what bar graphs are used for and gives students practice making them, with an answer key included. You can use it as a starting point for a science or math graphing unit.

Try this FREE Bar Graph lesson

Ready to teach graphing with the game?

If you already own Charty Party: All Ages Edition, the complete Charty Party graphing lessons give you a way to connect the game with sustained practice with graphs and data. If you need the game itself, you can find the All Ages Edition at Very Special Games.

Start with the free bar graph lesson, and see how a little graphing practice can prepare students to get more out of the game.