Presenting the Project

Age 7 to 11

Challenge Level Yellow star

Presenting the Project

There are thirty children in Class 5. All the first part of the summer term they had been doing a project collecting data about themselves and making all sorts of lists, charts and graphs to present it.

Now it is June and they are going to present all they have done in the project to the whole school. There is double excitement in the classroom that day because it is also one of the children's birthdays.

Here is some of the work they have done:

On what day did Class 5 present their work?

Here are some more charts and posters made by Class 5 for their project.

What information can you find out about the child whose birthday it was on project day?

There are twins in this class. What information can you find out about them?

Why do this problem?

This problem requires learners to use the different forms of data to answer questions. It is made harder by the fact that they will need to look at more than one chart/table/graph in order to answer a single question.

Possible approach

The individual charts are not too difficult to interpret and so a good way into this activity might be to ask some introductory questions about a few of them in turn, just concentrating on one at a time.

At a basic level, this might involve just checking that the class know what M, T, W etc stand for in the calendar and similarly what J, F, M etc mean. You might also want to ask whether there are more boys or more girls in this class. These initial questions will enable the group to become more familiar with the data without the problem itself becoming trivial.

After this introduction learners could work in pairs on the problem on a computer or from a printed sheet so that they are able to talk through their ideas with a partner.

You may find it useful to have larger copies of the charts to project or have on the board. Here are pdfs each containing an enlarged image:

June calendar

Boys/girls bar chart

Birth dates by gender