Survey, Tally and Graph

Kids can be taught about organizing data, analysis, and presentation through a simple survey activity. Children learn best when they move around and collect data. After collecting the data, they learn to present the data through a simple graph.  These hands on graphing practice will help them to read graphs and tables at more advanced levels later.

We did two surveys this week.  The first day, my daughter and I stood in our balcony and recorded the traffic data for 10 minutes. I helped my little one to draw the tally marks to 5 and also to draw the bar graph for her data. The first bar graph was not to scale as shown here. The main idea here is to show how the graph represents the data.

The next day, she was given with another project – Tree survey. She recorded the count of our backyard trees.

Then I gave her a graph sheet (hand drawn) and asked her to draw the bar graph.  We also had an analysis session like “10 more than, equal to, 5 less than, 2 more than,etc".