How to teach your kid to track data, make a bar chart and spot a trend

Charts are everywhere: the weather forecast, sports stats, the news. Kids who can collect their own data, chart it and say what it means understand those charts from the inside. And the best data is the kind they care about: how much they slept, how many steps they took, how many days it rained.

Why it's worth doing

Data skills build through school. In schools using the Common Core math standards, first graders organize and interpret data with up to three categories. By third grade, kids draw scaled bar graphs, where each square might stand for 5 pets, and answer "how many more" and "how many less" questions from them. Tracking real data at home puts those skills to work.

Own the question. The CDC's tips for ages 9 to 11 include helping children set their own goals and think about skills they want to develop. Picking what to track, and why, is a small version of that.

Skill 1: Track something for two weeks

1. Pick one thing to track.
2. Make a table with a row for each day.
3. Fill it in every day for two weeks.
4. Look for patterns.

Good things to track:

• Weather: high temperature, or rain/no rain.
• Steps, if you have a step counter.
• Sleep: what time you fell asleep and woke up, and total hours.
• Minutes reading, or pages read.
• Bird visits to a feeder.

An example table:

Sleep makes a great project. The CDC says school-age children (6 to 12) need 9 to 12 hours of sleep a night, so your child has a real target to compare their data to. Working out hours of sleep from bedtime and wake-up time is also great elapsed-time practice. (More in morning and bedtime routines.)

Consistency is the hard part. Put the table somewhere they'll see it at the same time each day, like next to their bed or on the fridge.

Skill 2: Make a bar chart

1. Draw the two lines for your chart: one across the bottom, one up the side.
2. Label the bottom and the side.
3. Draw a bar for each thing you counted.
4. Color the bars and add a title.

Choosing a scale is the key decision. If your biggest number is 12, each square can be 1. If it's 12,000 steps, each square might be 1,000. Graph paper and a ruler make it neat.

Bar chart or line chart? A bar chart compares things: rainy days vs. sunny days, or steps on each day. A line chart shows change over time, like temperature across two weeks. Both are worth trying.

Check for honest charts. Start the side scale at zero. A chart that starts at 8 hours can make 9 hours look like twice as much as 8½. That's a sneaky trick some real charts use, and spotting it is a great critical-thinking skill.

The challenge: present a trend to the family

The mastery goal is to present a chart to the family and say what the trend means.

1. Look at your chart for a pattern.
2. Write one sentence about the trend.
3. Show the chart to your family.
4. Explain what it means.

Good trend sentences:

• "I slept less on school nights than weekends, about an hour less."
• "It got warmer almost every day in the second week."
• "I took the most steps on days I had soccer practice."

Then ask "why?" And "what would you do about it?" If school nights are short on sleep, maybe bedtime should move. That's data turning into a decision.

Careful with "because." If steps were higher on soccer days, soccer probably explains it. But two things happening together doesn't always mean one caused the other. That's a great idea to plant early.

Make it a quest

In Family Quests, this is the Data Keeper skill, the top of the Math branch. Practice quests are track something for two weeks (weather, steps, sleep) in a table and make a bar chart, and the mastery quest is present a chart to the family and say what the trend means. Start free.

Next: go back to percents and unit prices, or read about morning and bedtime routines.