This displays the Getting started on page 277 of the Student Resource Book.

• Students who are beginning Level 2 will have been introduced to sorting and displaying data in different ways. Talk about the different ways that they have displayed the data. Which displays make it easy to see how many different types of fish there are?
• Ask students to suggest what questions they could answer from the displays they have created. For example, “What fish did Jess see most often?” “What fish did Jess see least often?”  How many more than did Jess see?

This gives students an opportunity to take part in a survey about playground equipment.

• There is a printable master with copies of the playground equipment for this sheet, but you could also have students write their choice on a small piece of card (make sure each piece is of equal size).
• It may be helpful if photos are taken of each display, so that cards can be reused in a different arrangement. Alternatively, you could ask students to pick or write their one choice four times.
• You could ask students to talk about what they notice about the data in each If student do not offer their own suggestions, you could prompt students with questions such as: Which piece of equipment do most / least students want? How many students wanted the slide? How many more/ less wanted the sandpit than the tyre swing?
  You could also discuss which display they used or which was easier to find the answer for each question.
• Finally, you should ask your students to answer the question and decide what equipment Max’s school should get for the playground and why. Do not be surprised if students suggest a personal choice, possibly supported with a reference to safety (or fun), rather than what the data indicated was most popular. If this happens you could use the opportunity afforded by the suggestion to introduce the idea of ‘data-based decision making’.

This displays some surveys where a tally chart might be a useful way to collect information.

• It is a good idea to encourage children to suggest all the other ways that information could be counted, for example, sorting into piles and counting or measuring the pile, voting, counting order forms, counting how many of each type of sausage is left after the barbeque, before evaluating the merits of each.
• This activity may help students to realise that there is often more than one way to collect information, and that tally charts are not always the most efficient method. You could ask students to develop guidelines for when tally charts might be most useful, for example, when speed of recording is important, for an action that won’t be repeated, to quickly group information.

This displays a sheet where a class has recorded the time taken to eat their lunch. The sheet asks students to label the horizontal axis and explain what the dot plot shows.

• Students should be able to draw upon the reference to time in the title and their own experience to infer that the unit of the time scale will be in minutes rather than seconds or hours.
• It is important to draw children’s attention to the outliers in the graph and encourage them to think of reasons that students might have eaten their lunch so quickly or slowly.

This displays a sheet with a pictograph displaying favourite fruit choices.

• Students could be placed in small groups to conduct a similar survey about the fruit preferences of different groups (for example, different classes, year groups, or their own families). Each group could display their own data, before swapping graphs with another group. The students could use these questions as a starting point for interpreting each other’s graphs.