Pictographs
Background Information & Activities

© 1999-2012 BrainPOP. All rights reserved.

Help children quantify information in the world around them by teaching them how to read and understand graphs and collect, organize, and display data. This movie will explain how to read and create pictographs. It will also discuss tally charts and tally marks. You may wish to view the Tally Charts and Bar Graphs movie as extension or review.

Review with children that a pictograph is a graph that organizes and shows information using pictures. Display a pictograph and discuss it together or play the movie and pause when a pictograph is on the screen. Point out the title and labels. Explain that the key is a chart that explains what symbols or abbreviations mean. Remind children that a key might show that a picture stands for one or more than one. As a result, they should pay careful attention to information in the key and be prepared to skip-count when they analyze the data. Together with children, interpret the data in the pictograph and ask questions about it for children to answer. Be sure to have them explain how they arrived at their answers.

Guide children in creating a pictograph. You may wish to start with a survey, which is a list of questions used to collect information or opinions. You may want to conduct a survey asking about people's favorite subjects, colors, sports, or animals. Show children how to record answers in a tally chart. Explain that we group or bundle tally marks into groups of five so they are easier to count. You may want to compare counting single tally marks and counting tally marks that are grouped into fives. Then show how to convert information from a tally chart into a pictograph. Remind children to title their pictograph, write the labels, and create the key. Ask questions about the graph and challenge children to ask each other questions about the data.

Help children understand graphs and visualize information in different ways. Why might we create pictographs and other kinds of graphs? How are they helpful? Where can you find them? Invite children to look for graphs in books, magazines, newspapers, and on the Internet. Help them understand that we have access to huge amounts of information, so we find simple ways to communicate and organize it.

See more lesson plans and resources: BrainPOP Educators.

Pictographs Teacher Activities

© 1999-2012 BrainPOP. All rights reserved.

Favorite Fruit

Create a survey together about students' favorite fruit. Come up with a question together and have students take the survey. Record their answers on the board using a tally chart. You may want students to come up to the board and record their choice on the tally chart themselves. Be sure to instruct them to mark every fifth tally mark across the other four. Then use the data in the tally chart to create a pictograph. To challenge students, have each symbol in the graph stand for more than one vote, such as two or three. Display the pictograph in the classroom. If possible, serve the fruit that gets the most votes.

Data Miners

Have students bring in a pictograph, bar graph, or other graph into class. Children may want to clip graphs from magazines or newspapers, or find them online and print them out. Then choose a few graphs to discuss and analyze together. Challenge students to take the same information in the graph and display it using another kind of graph.

Pictographs Family Activities

© 1999-2012 BrainPOP. All rights reserved.

Vote for a Sport

Be active with your child! Create a survey about favorite sports, such as swimming, soccer, basketball, or baseball. Then have your child survey his or her friends about their favorite sport. You may want to review how to record votes using a tally chart. Then create a pictograph to display the information. Afterward, gather the friends together to play the sport that got the most votes!

Take a Walk

Plan a hike or walk with your child. Before your trip, make predictions about what interesting things you might see and create a tally chart to organize the possibilities. Bring the tally chart along on your walk and have your child record what he or she sees. After, analyze the data together. How many birds did you see? How many dogs? How many more squirrels did you see than people? What did you see the most of? The least? Have your child turn the tally chart information into a pictograph and share it with the rest of the family.