Smarties Graph

Curriculum Goal

Collect, organize, display, and interpret data to solve problems and to communicate information, and explore the concept of probability in everyday contexts (#19).

Collect data through observations, experiments, and interviews to answer questions of interest that focus on a single piece of information; record the data using methods of their choice; and organize the data in tally tables.
Display sets of data, using one-to-one correspondence, in concrete graphs, pictographs, line plots, and bar graphs with proper sources, titles, and labels.
Analyse different sets of data presented in various ways, including in logic diagrams, line plots, and bar graphs, by asking and answering questions about the data and drawing conclusions, then make convincing arguments and informed decisions.

Explain that each student will be getting a box of Smarties and sorting them by colour.
Ask students to place each Smartie on the graph according to the colour.
Ensure students have sorted the smarties by colour.
Have students take each column off one at a time and colour the boxes in with the corresponding marker colour (e.g., a student would colour 3 boxes in if they received 3 red Smarties).
Once their graphs are complete, ask students to answer the questions about their box of Smarties (e.g., How many red Smarties did you have? Which did you have the most of?).
Ask students to compare their graph with another classmate.

For a follow up lesson, see “Circle to bar graph” in The Robertson Program math lesson library.