26/8/15

We had a brief chat about what a bar chart is  and I made a very quick one on the ground by drawing lines to show how many children were wearing willies / trainers / school shoes etc. I then challenged the children to go off in their groups and make a bar chart to show the different types of things that can be found on the woodland floor (no litter). This was the first session of the year and some of the class have never worked in the woods before.

The results were interesting and although one group scratched out squares ( as in squared paper), most made columns from materials. we were able to discuss misleading graphs ie one column was very tall but contained fewer items (ie 5 large leaves) than a shorter column of beech nut cases ( 14).

To finish I gave the children one minute to collect as much as they could and we then created a huge chart. I asked the children to draw conclusions about the chart..

On reflection, we were actually building pictograms, not bar charts!