Graph of the Day puts one real-world graph on the whiteboard with its title hidden, so the class has to work out what it is showing before you tell them. There are 51 graphs, each hand-picked from Our World in Data because it holds a surprise: child mortality, the marathon record, tigers, satellites, the price of getting to space. Every one comes with the questions, the story behind it and a printable sheet, so there is nothing to prepare. Open it and the graph is on the board.
Take today's graph, a random one, or pick by topic. It is the same graph for every class in the world on a given day, which is what makes it a daily graph rather than a bank of charts, but nothing stops you choosing.
The board opens on a line and an axis under the heading "What is this graph telling us?" Nothing else. That is deliberate, and it is the whole routine.
Each graph also carries one specific question with a real answer, for the moment when "what do you notice" has run its course and you want to check they can actually read the thing.
The one that landed hardest with my class was Arctic sea ice in September. With the title hidden they could see a line plummeting until 2012 and then creeping back up, and from the unit they worked out it was something to do with climate. What they did not expect was the reveal: the last decade has not been the lowest. My class gets told, often, that climate change is a serious problem, and it is. But a graph that does not simply go down was reassuring to them in a way I had not planned for, and the argument that followed, about whether a line that wobbles upwards is a recovery or just a wobble, was the best data talk we have had. That is the app's own question for this graph, and I did not have to ask it. We looked up polar bear numbers next, because someone asked, and found that some counts show them rising and others do not. The class ended up with the most honest answer there is, that it is still argued about, which is a better lesson than either headline.
You could build a whole lesson out of one of these graphs, and we have. There is so much in each one that you can take it any way you like: research, a project, a debate, a piece of writing. My teaching assistant is surprised as often as the children are. "I didn't even realise that was the case" has become a regular thing to hear at the back of the room.
Some are heavy, yes. Deaths in war, depression, child labour and child mortality are all in the set, alongside pandas, the marathon record and electric cars. Check the graph before you put it up, the way you would check any resource, and pitch it to the year group in front of you. The topic filter makes that quick, and the graphs are labelled by tone: hope, urgency, insight or complex.
What I have found with the heavier ones is that children rise to them if you warn them first and ask whether they are ready. They want to show you they can handle it. Give them that trust and the discussion is more grown-up than you expect, and you come out of it closer to the class than you went in. Most of the heavy graphs are also the hopeful ones: the point of the child mortality graph is that a fifth birthday used to be a miracle and now it is ordinary.
Both, and that is down to you. As a starter it is Notice, Wonder, Reveal and out, a few minutes at the start of maths or as the class settles. As a lesson it is the full routine, the story, the specific question and the printed sheet, with the graph as the stimulus for research or writing. As a project it is the starting point and the class takes it from there.
Some days you barely need to speak. Put it on the board and let the children lead from their own discussion points. If the talk needs structure, pass a tennis ball round and only the child holding it speaks. If it needs more than that, print the sheet: the graph unrevealed on paper, with Notice, Wonder and So What boxes for each child to write in before the title goes up.
If you run a morning routine on the board, the same graph appears as a tile on Morning Board, so it can be there as the class comes in without opening anything.
Two kinds, at opposite ends. The curious child who reads non-fiction, gravitates to numbers and already knows a surprising amount about the world gets something most starters do not give them: a graph that can still surprise them, and a room that wants to hear what they know. And the child with almost no knowledge of the world yet gets a way in, because every graph was chosen for its surprise, and a surprise needs no background. Nobody has to know what the Montreal Protocol was to notice that a line fell off a cliff in 1989 and ask why.
Slow Reveal Graphs is a good free routine and the idea is the same: hide the labels, let the class make sense of the data first. The difference is what you have to do. There you download a graph and build your own slides, questions and pacing. Here the hidden title, the reveal, the story, the specific question and the printable sheet are already done for all 51 graphs, and one of them is picked for you each day. It is the same routine with the preparation removed.
Is Graph of the Day free?
Free to try. Opening it uses one token for the whole day, however many graphs you look at or times you come back to it. Every account gets 20 free tokens and Pro gives 50 a day. Printing the sheet costs nothing extra.
Where do the graphs come from?
Our World in Data, the Oxford-based research project. Each graph is hand-picked and redrawn with rounded figures, so the class reads the shape rather than the third decimal place. Nothing is generated by AI.
Can I choose the graph, or is it one a day?
Both. Today's graph is picked for you and is the same for everyone. You can also take a random one, or browse all 51 by topic and pick the one that fits your lesson, which is how it works as a graph of the week too.
Is there a worksheet?
Yes. Print sheet gives each child the graph with the title still hidden and three boxes: what do you notice, what does it make you wonder, and why does it matter to us.
What ages is it for?
Upper primary and upper elementary through to secondary and high school, roughly ages 9 to 16. The routine is the same at every age; what changes is which graph you pick and how far you take the discussion.
Morning Board carries today's graph as one tile among the date, the weather and a word of the day. Word Cloud collects every child's "I notice" in one word on the board. For reasoning in maths rather than data, Shape, Space and Measure Reasoning runs a daily problem the same way.
Written by a practising primary school teacher · checked September 2026