Lesson Notes By Weeks and Term v5 - Grade 3

Lesson Video

This page supports the lesson note with a companion video and a short classroom-ready summary.

For class groups and homework, share this lesson page so learners also get the summary, objectives, and full lesson context.

Performance objectives

• Welcome to the exciting world of Data Handling! Data is all around us, from the number of goals scored in a Bafana Bafana soccer match to the different types of cars you see on the way to school. Data handling is the skill of being a 'data detective'. It helps us to collect information (data), sort it out so it makes sense, and show it to others in a clear way using charts and graphs. In South Africa, this is a very important skill. A spaza shop owner uses data to know which sweets are the most popular, a doctor uses data to track how many children are healthy, and we use data to see which sports our friends love the most! This week, we will learn the first steps of being great data detectives, a skill that will help you in all your subjects and in your exams.
• By the end of this week's lessons, you will be able to:
• Collect and sort data using a simple survey and record it with tally marks.
• Organise data neatly into a data table.
• Represent data by drawing a simple pictograph and a bar graph with one-to-one correspondence.

Lesson summary

Welcome to the exciting world of Data Handling! Data is all around us, from the number of goals scored in a Bafana Bafana soccer match to the different types of cars you see on the way to school. Data handling is the skill of being a 'data detective'. It helps us to collect information (data), sort it out so it makes sense, and show it to others in a clear way using charts and graphs. In South Africa, this is a very important skill. A spaza shop owner uses data to know which sweets are the most popular, a doctor uses data to track how many children are healthy, and we use data to see which sports our friends love the most!

Lesson notes

What is Data? Data is just a collection of information. It can be numbers, words, or even pictures. For example, if we ask everyone in our class what their favourite fruit is, their answers are our data.

Step 1: Collecting Data with Tally Marks When we get a lot of answers, we need a quick way to count them. We use tally marks. A tally mark is just a straight line ( | ) for each item we count. When we get to five, we do something special to make counting easier: we draw four lines down and one line across them. This is called a 'gate' and it always means 5. 1 = | 2 = || 3 = ||| 4 = |||| 5 = ||||