Glyphs for Kids

How to Create Glyphs

Nov 16, 2006 Debbie DeSpirt

Glyphs are 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 to understand the glyph. Glyphs can be utilized for educational and personal information. The creation of glyphs requires problem solving, communication, and data organization.

Before students create their first glyph, model a live glyph with some of the students.

Live Glyph

• 5 or 6 students come to the front of the class and line up in a straight row facing the other students.

• Have 1 student write the legend on the board.

• The volunteered students must listen carefully to the question and the appropriate answers and their actions.

• For example, the teacher tells the student volunteers to touch their hair if they did not complete last night’s math homework or keep their hands at their side if they completed their homework.

• The teacher then asks students to stick out their tongue if they found the math homework hard or smile if the homework was easy. The teacher will proceed to ask a variety of questions and the volunteered students must do the action appropriate to their response.

After the living glyphs are created the teacher may ask the class a variety of questions based on the data being demonstrated by the volunteered students. For example, the teacher may ask what percentage of students completed their homework. All the information is found with the aid of the glyph legend and the living glyphs.

Next the teacher may ask for 5 or 6 new volunteers and have the remaining students assist in asking the questions and creating actions to the different responses. It is important to get all students involved in the task. You can create glyphs by writing the legend on chart paper or on the blackboard to ask about the students activities the previous night. Great tool to represent a variety of information quickly.

Glyph Activity for Personal Information

• All students draw a large circle.

• Students who have blonde hair will color the glyph yellow, red hair; red, brown hair; brown and black hair; shade in with a pencil.

• Students will divide the circle based on the number of siblings. An only child will not divide the circle; a student with one sibling will divide the circle into two, student with three students into three and so on.

• Students will place a dot in the center of the circle if they are involved in school sports, a square if they are involved in sports outside the school, or a star if they are involved in school sports and outside sport activities.

The list is endless for the above glyph activity. The circles can be displayed with the legend for students to learn more about their fellow classmates. Glyphs are useful instruments to illustrate a variety of personal and educational information.