Data handling for year 5: bar chart showing frequency

bar-chart-footballThis bar chart is of a type which children may not have come across before. It shows the frequency of events; in this case the frequency of the number of goals scored by ‘The Albion’. The term ‘mode’ is used, which means the most common as well as other terms such as ‘maximum’.

Care needs to be taken when answering questions such as how many goals did they score in total? It is no good just reading the frequency from the left hand side – look at the number of times two goals were scored, which is 6 times. This means that 12 goals were scored in these games!

Old football tables can be easily found in papers etc and prove a rich source of data for children to create their own frequency charts.

Bar chart showing frequency: football

Data handling for year 4: Bar charts

bar-chart-busesIt is a while since I have posted anything on data handling so here is a page on interpreting bar charts, which also uses the 24 hour clock. it is important to point out that charts such as these must have a proper title and that the axes must be labelled. When children produce their own bar charts they often forget to do this labelling.

When looking at a bar chart one of the first things to do is work out how the numbers are being represented. In this case the number of people on the bus is shown in blocks of 10 and half way between would be a block of 5.

Bar chart: buses