The purpose of this activity is for students to create a bar graph that includes features that help communicate the data clearly. A class picture graph is created, and students make a bar graph using that data. During the Activity Synthesis, focus attention on similarities and differences between picture and bar graphs. 

When you create the blank “ways to get home” picture graph for the Launch, feel free to adjust the categories based on how your students get home from school. When students label their graphs, including a title, categories, a key for a picture graph, and scale numbers for a bar graph, they are communicating clearly and precisely (MP6).

• “How are our picture graph and bar graph alike?” (They both show the same data. They have the same categories.)
• “How are our picture graph and bar graph different?” (The picture graph has a key, but the bar graph has a scale. For the picture graph, we have to count each picture, but in the bar graph, we can use the numbers on the side to tell how many.)

The purpose of this activity is for students to answer one- and two-step “how many more?” questions using data represented in a bar graph. Students decide if statements about the data shown in the bar graph from the previous activity are true or false and then answer questions about the data. When students use expression or equations or describe adding or subtracting to find how many more or less, they show they can decontextualize and recontextualize the data to make sense of and solve the problems (MP2). The teacher will generate the questions students answer in this task from the class graph.

• Ask students to share their responses to each Compare problem. 
• “Do you have any lingering questions about how to answer these questions from the bar graph?” 
• Consider asking: “What equation matches your thinking?”