• Enriching data handling is a helpful article by Nrich that considers ways to make work in this area more appealing to children.

Activity set A

Show the available data on the Data Handling or the Line Graph ITP and ask the children to interpret what they can see.

Show a time graph like the one below and ask the children to make up a story about it:

You might like to ask the children to explore ‘You Tell the Story’ from Nrich which asks the children to create a story that describes the movement of man and his sheep.

Activity set B

As a class create a problem to solve, such as Mr Pike is going to open a pet shop. He wants to know which pets he should stock. He only wants to stock 5 to begin with. Write a selection of possible pets on the board. Take a survey of the pets the children in the class would choose and use the ITP Data Handling to enter this data. Display it as a bar chart. You could then ask the children to make up questions from the chart for the rest of the class to answer and conclude from the information which five pets Mr Pike should stock.

Carry out a human bar graph activity. Think of a scenario such as favourite foods. Give each child a sticky note and ask them to draw their favourite food onto it – no words, just pictures. Next ask them, in small groups, to stick the notes on the board to make a bar chart. As they do this, listen to what they say. Someone might wonder what one of the drawings is and this can lead into a discussion about the importance of labels. You could then ask some of the children to write labels for the different foods and add them to the board to form a horizontal axis. Once all the post it notes are on the board, discuss the best scale size for the vertical axis. If you decide to go up in steps of two, double up the post it notes for all the foods and then ask some children to write the appropriate numbers and add these to the bar chart. When you have done that discuss why a title would be useful and add this. The children could then draw the bar chart on paper and write some statements about the information it shows.

You might like to work through ‘Class 5’s Names’ from Nrich which asks the children to explore different charts to identify which member of the class was away.

Examples of what children should be able to do, in relation to each (boxed) Programme of Study statement

interpret and present discrete and continuous data using appropriate graphical methods, including bar charts and time graphs

• Collect data, measuring where necessary. They work with a range of data, such as shoe size and width of shoe across the widest part of the foot, the number of letters in children’s names, the width of their hand spans, the distance around their neck and wrist, data from nutrition panels on cereal packets, and so on.
• They decide on a suitable question or hypothesis to explore for each data set they work on. For example, ‘We think that…boys have larger shoes than girls’, ‘…our neck measurements are twice as long as our wrist measurements’, ‘…girls’ names have more letters than boys’ names’ or ‘…children in our class would prefer to come to school by car but they usually have to walk’.
• Children consider what data to collect and how to collect it. They collect their data and organise it in a table. They choose a Venn or Carroll diagram, or a horizontal or vertical pictogram or bar chart to represent the data. Where appropriate, they use the support of an ICT package. They justify their choice within the group so that they can present it.
• They understand that they can join the tops of the bars on the bar-line chart to create a line graph because all the points along the line have meaning.

solve comparison, sum and difference problems using information presented in bar charts, pictograms, tables and other graphs

• Undertake one or more of three enquiries:
  • What vehicles are very likely to pass the school gate between 10:00 am and 11:00 am? Why? What vehicles would definitely not pass by? Why not? What vehicles would be possible but not very likely? Why? What if it were a different time of day? What if the weather were different?
  • Does practice improve estimation skills? Children estimate the lengths of five given lines and record the estimate, measured length and difference. They repeat the activity with five more lines to see whether their estimation skills have improved after feedback.
  • What would children in our class most like to change in the school? Children carry out a survey after preliminary research to whittle down the number of options to a sensible number, e.g. no more than five.
  • Children identify a hypothesis and decide what data to collect to investigate their hypothesis. They collect the data they need and decide on a suitable representation. In groups, they consider different possibilities for their representation and explain why they have made their choice.
  • In the first enquiry, children use tallies and bar charts. In the second, they use tables and bar charts to compare the two sets of measurements. In the third, they use a range of tables and charts to show their results, including Venn and Carroll diagrams. They use ICT where appropriate.

• The video ‘Data Handling’ three different data handling activities carried out by children from Years 3 and 4. The first is about their favourite school meals into a human bar graph. The second is based around the Olympics and the third is to do with collecting data related to time.