The purpose of this activity is for students to collect data and represent it to create a class display. In this activity, students are asked a question and choose a picture to represent their response. When students are invited to add their picture to the class display, do not provide additional guidance on what the display should look like. Students may choose to add their picture next to other pictures that are the same or next to their partner’s or other friends’ pictures without attention to category. It is okay if the display looks disorganized. In the Activity Synthesis, students answer questions about the data and may see that it could be easier to answer these questions if the data were represented in a more organized way.

• “How could we find out how many students in our class took the bus to school today?” (We could count all the pictures of buses.)
• “What other questions could we ask about how we got to school today based on our chart?” (How many students walked to school? How many students rode in a car?)
• "Is it easy to answer these questions from our chart just by looking at it? Why or why not?" (No, the pictures are all over, you might lose count. It’d be easier if they were in lines or together. Yes, you can just count each picture.)

The purpose of this activity is for students to represent data in an organized way. In grade 1, students were introduced to each of the representations shown in the Student Responses section below.

Students should have access to tools that may help them represent the data, such as extra copies of the pictures from the previous activity, scissors, glue or tape, markers, or stickers. Throughout the activity, students make their own decisions about what to use to represent the data and reflect on their choices (MP5). The activity can serve as a formative assessment to see what students already know about representing data. During the Lesson Synthesis, students see different representations and discuss the similarities and differences of each.

This activity uses MLR7 Compare and Connect. Advances: representing, conversing.

MLR7 Compare and Connect

• Display a student’s representation that used pictures and a student’s representation that used marks or other symbols.
• “What is the same and what is different between these representations?”
• 30 seconds quiet think time
• 1 minute: partner discussion
• “What suggestions do you have for _____ to make their representation more clear?” (_____ could count the marks and put how many in all for each group.)