Tally Charts and Bar Graphs Background Information for Teachers, Parents and Caregivers
This page provides information to support educators and families in teaching K-3 students about tally charts and bar graphs. It is designed to complement the Tally Charts and Bar Graphs topic page on BrainPOP Jr.
Remind your children that graphs are useful tools for organizing and showing information. People can collect data, or information, by taking surveys. Then they can create tally charts and bar graphs to help people visualize data, answer questions, and make predictions. Your children should be familiar with surveys and using, creating, and analyzing tally charts and bar graphs.
During a survey, people ask others questions to collect information, or data. The U.S. Census Bureau is a department that collects information about the entire population of the United States. The U.S. Census collects data about the kinds of homes people live in, how they get to work, where they go to school, where they work, etc. Census workers take surveys of people and record information, which is then used to create bar graphs, pie charts, and other charts that help visualize the large amounts of data. Businesses, organizations, and departments of the government use this information to make predictions about markets and to figure out how to reach certain sub-populations or groups.
Review with your children that tally charts help people count. Each tally mark in a tally chart represents one object. For example, to count three apples, you make three tally marks in the chart. Tally marks are grouped in sets of five, which facilitates counting. Instead of counting marks one-by-one, you can skip-count by fives and add on any remaining marks. Practice counting objects in your class or home by using tally marks. Then practice skip-counting by fives in order to get your children familiar with multiples of five.
Your children should know how to create a bar graph from a tally chart. A bar graph uses bars to represent and display data. The bottom of the graph (the x-axis) lists categories in a given data set and the side of the graph (the y-axis) lists numbers. Your children should be able to draw a bar up from a category to a specific number in order to represent the number of objects in that category. Remind your children to give graphs titles and label each axis.
Bar graphs allow people to analyze data and compare information. Discuss where your children have seen or used bar graphs before. Display different bar graphs for your children and help them draw conclusions from the data.
