Story Graphs
About This Worksheet
This Grade 8 worksheet helps students connect real-world situations with the graph pattern that would represent each one. Students read stories involving a filling pool, cycling distance, laptop battery life, a runner’s progress, auditorium attendance, and submarine depth. For each situation, they choose among several graph descriptions that show different combinations of rising, falling, and constant behavior. The activity develops students’ ability to visualize how quantities change over time and represent those changes with function graphs.
Curriculum and Grade Alignment
This worksheet supports CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.8.F.B.5 by asking students to describe and interpret functional relationships using qualitative graph behavior. Students connect verbal changes in a situation with intervals where a graph increases, decreases, or stays constant. This is an important Grade 8 function skill because it helps students understand graphs as stories about changing quantities rather than just collections of points.
Student Tasks
Students read six real-world scenarios and select the graph pattern that best matches each one. They must recognize phrases that signal an increase, decrease, pause, constant amount, or reversal in direction. Situations include water being added steadily, traveling away and stopping, battery charge dropping, a runner pausing, people entering and leaving an auditorium, and a submarine changing depth. Students interpret the story in sequence and match that sequence to the correct graph description.
Common Challenges and Misconceptions
Students may mistake “stops” for the graph dropping to zero rather than remaining flat. They may also confuse moving toward a starting point with increasing distance or misread whether depth should rise or fall on a graph. Another common issue is looking only at the first part of the story instead of tracking the full sequence. Having students underline change words in order can make the graph behavior much easier to visualize.
Implementation Guidance
Ask students to divide each story into short stages and label each one as rise, fall, or flat before looking at the answer choices. For example, “moves away, stops, continues farther” becomes “rises, stays flat, rises.” This makes the selection process much more deliberate. The worksheet can be used for independent practice, small-group discussion, homework, or as preparation for drawing graphs from narrative descriptions.
Details and Features
The page contains six real-world scenarios with three possible graph-pattern choices for each. The contexts cover volume, distance, battery charge, motion, attendance, and depth. Because the questions emphasize qualitative changes instead of exact numbers, students can focus on function behavior and interpretation without being distracted by computation.