What the lesson is about

These resources cover collecting, recording and interpreting data and are suitable for lower and upper-primary pupils. The collection can help you to teach data handling in a meaningful way, and offers activities that encourage pupils to use tables and charts to collect information, as well as comparing various methods of displaying survey results.

Getting started

TESiboard has shared useful interactive pictogram activities that ask pupils to collect information, such as what their classmates’ favourite toys are, and then present their findings in a pictogram. Collections of data can be printed out to see if the results are what pupils expected.

For younger pupils, bevevans22 (TES contributor of the year 2011) has shared a data-handling board game where players have to collect different types of fruit. Once the game has been completed, pupils can fill out the accompanying worksheet and use a graph to find out who collected the most fruit. For upper primary, TeachersTV supplied a video with teachers from three different primary schools sharing their best data-handling lesson ideas to get the most out of pupils.

Taking it further

It is also vital that upper-primary pupils gain a thorough understanding of how to interpret data. Merry26 has shared a PowerPoint presentation that will generate discussion as to why correctly labelling data is important, and how to identify trends in results. NGfLCymru has shared a comprehensive set of resources suitable for pupils in Years 5 and 6 (P5- 6), which covers how to find the mode, median, mean and range in data.

Where to find it

www.tes.co.ukdata-handling.