With those ideas in our minds, GS recalled that, "in JK we did surveys to tell us about favourite things". Heading even further in the right direction, this point started to jog the memories of other students.
"Oh yeah! Like when we asked one another about our favourite colours and then marked it down!" added OR.
"We should do that again to see if the answers are different because there are different JK's because we are in SK now!" said DF. With everyone in agreeance, the SK's gave a quick rundown of how to do a survey to their JK friends. Quickly grasping the idea, the JK's were excited to join in the survey.
Below are the results we collected for determining the favourite colour between blue, green and red. We only used those choices to make it easy peasy for everyone to understand.
After doing this survey, Ms. O and Mrs. S got us wondering about how we could include the colours they really wished they could have chosen, pink and orange. This is when Mrs. Ridgway introduced (to the JK's) and reminded (the SK's) us about the 'other' option that we could use when doing surveys. We learned that some surveys let you pick 'other' if the answer that you really hoped would be there wasn't. This means that your vote is still counted, but that it wasn't one of the choices that the surveyors (the people asking the survey questions) were hoping for.
Below are the results we collected to show what everyone's favourite activity was at school. First, we found out using only three choices, then we did the survey again using the 'other' option.
Boy, were the results different with the extra option!
During December, we started talking about different ways we could show our results other than just by using a tally chart and counting up the numbers like we did for the one below. Mrs. Ridgway showed us an empty graph and many of us remembered what we could do with it to share the results of the data we collected.
Together, we talked about graphs and how we can use them to share information from surveys that looks more like a picture than a bunch of numbers and symbols. Mrs. Ridgway showed us how we could take the data (aka the information we get from the survey) we collected about artificial vs. real Christmas trees that we did and turn it into a graph.
At first, she put all of the tree counters in the space where the graphs could go. Man, was that ever a crazy looking graph! We decided that this wasn't a graph and that she must be trying to trick us. We were so clever and told her that since it looked so messy, it must not be right. She agreed and we discussed how we could sort the answers better to make them easier to understand. One of the most important things we realized was that if we put the pictures (aka counters) in a straight row, it was SO easy to count them.We even labelled the graph parts we talked about so then people who were learning about graphs might be able to figure them out even faster! Check out our results below.
