Surveying the field

4 - 6 years

Ideas to help your child practise their numeracy skills - with you, and online

Mother And Daughter Putting Star On Reward Chart

Developed in partnership with Education Services Australia

The Australian Curriculum sets the goal for what all students should learn as they progress through their school life. Skills in the Foundation Year curriculum include:

displaying and interpreting information using real objects
grouping objects according to characteristics to form a simple data display
asking and answering simple data questions.

Use these tips to help your child practise these skills as part of everyday life.

Collate orders

When you’re ordering drinks in a cafe, ask your child to take everyone’s order and summarise it for the waiter.

I want a juice, Mum wants a coffee and your sister wants a juice, so how many juices and coffees do we need to order?

Conduct surveys

When you want to involve everyone in making a family decision, ask your child to be the family surveyer. This will give them great experience at designing a survey question, recording responses in a table or graph, and working out the most popular answer.

It's important that the survey question is appropriate – you are deciding where to go on the weekend, you don't want the most popular answer to be 'go to the moon'! So help your child think about whether to ask:

a yes/no question – eg Do you want to go to the beach?

or
a multiple-choice question – eg Would you like to go to the beach, the swimming pool or the park?

or
an open-ended question – eg Where do you want to go?

Chart data over time

Collecting data over a number of days introduces an extra element. our child can create their basic chart, put it on the fridge, and add new data every day. For example, they could chart how many litres of milk are used each day, and then report on:

Charting their good behaviour, or pocket money activities, is also excellent practice – and possibly more motivating!