Sample Lesson

Where Do I Live? Counts

Objectives:

To use tallies and traffic/pedestrian counts to investigate how busy our local area is.

Resources:

What is my area like? worksheet Download What is my area like? worksheet

Introduction

Today we will be looking at how busy your area is and learning some new words to describe the areas in which we live.

Main Activity

First of all use the What is my area like? worksheet – ask your child to read all of the words and to circle or colour the ones that describe your area. Ask them to try to add some more words of their own. Check their understanding of all of the terms (for example, suburbs).

Next, use the Blank Tally Chart to conduct a count of pedestrians and/or traffic. How long you need to count for will depend on how busy your street is - somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes should be sufficient. If you live somewhere very quiet or remote you may want to travel to a local shop or main road.

Before you start, make sure that your child understands how to keep a tally - 4 lines straight down, and then the 5th across diagonally to make a 'gate'.

Once you have returned home, carefully count up the total for each category - this is good 'counting in 5s' practice.

You can ask questions such as:

Which transport did we see most of?
Why do you think there were fewer lorries than buses?
How many cyclists did we see?

Then use the Blank Bar Chart for your child to draw a graph of their results.

Before they start, you will need to help your child to choose a suitable scale for their axis (going up the side of the graph) - depending on how busy your road was, you may want to go up in 5s, 10s or even 20s. The different things that they have observed and counted will be labelled along the bottom of the graph (for example, cars, lorries, bicycles).

Challenge Activity

Graphs normally include a paragraph describing what they show. See if your child can write a paragraph for their graph – remind them to say which category was most common and which was least common. They could also try and explain why they think this is.