The Human Graph

As our culminating activity for a Week of Maths and to celebrate National Maths Day, the whole school got together to create a human graph and to answer the age-old question...

What Fruit Did You Have For Breakfast?

Very sneakily, this combined maths (data collection and representation) with a healthy diet.

Here are a few pics of what it all looked like:

Getting ourselves organised - yes, it took a bit of time. 560 kids to organise.

That's the "apple" line disappearing into the distance - very popular with the kids. "Bananas" is the next longest and the one you can see further across coming in third place is "strawberries" - they're very cheap at the moment.

Yep, that's the "strawberries" group with "apples" and "bananas" on the far left of the picture.

I got some Year 6 kids to design the data categories. They chose:

1. Apple
2. Avocado
3. Banana
4. Fruit Salad 
5. Grapes
6. Kiwi fruit
7. Mandarin
8. Orange
9. Peach
10. Pear
11. Rockmelon
12. Strawberry
13. Tomato
14. Watermelon 
15. Other
16. None

Results

 1. Apple was the most popular fruit for breakfast, followed by banana and then strawberry.

2. Only 25 children had no fruit for breakfast.

3. Only 1 person had tomato for breakfast and 1 had avocado. These were the two smallest categories.

4. There was a protest that bananas are a herb. 

5. There was an interesting selection of fruits in the "Other" category  - star fruit, cherries, pineapple, etc

6. Everyone had some fun.

So what?

Over the week, have we achieved anything?

I think so.

• We have focused the kids' attention on data collection. 
• We have got them to think about some of the issues behind working with data.
• We have constructed graphs.
• We have made statements based on information represented in graphs.
• We have made some sound generalisations about how to handle data.
• We have participated in an activity across the whole school P-6.
• We have had some fun.

Can't wait till next year...