Next week is very much a Handling Data week for older children. We will have two quite tricky weather graphs for Year 5 and some pie chart work for Year 6.
The weather graphs will show the average maximum and minimum temperatures for each month of the year for different places. It is typical of many found on weather sites on the Internet, holiday brochures and newspapers. It is surprising how often children ‘mess up’ with graph work, especially when labelling axes and interpreting the scales correctly.
Pie charts are not my favourite way of displaying data as they can often be misrepresented in the press. It is important to realise that they are only useful when comparing a slice to the whole pie, not comparing slices to different pies.