Graphing: Bar Graphs

Lesson Plan - Get It!

Audio:

Graphing is a great way to represent data.

In the previous Graphing series Related Lesson, found in the right-hand sidebar, you learned how to read and interpret pictographs. In this lesson, you will learn how to read and understand bar graphs.

One thing that makes bar graphs different from pictographs is how the data is represented. Pictographs use pictures; bar graphs use number and bars.

Take a look at the Nicest Fruit bar graph again.

The title of the bar graph is Nicest Fruit. This tells you the bar graph is about which fruits were voted to be the nicest fruit.

The label and numbers down the left side of the graph show the number of people that voted. The labels at the bottom show which fruits were voted for. The bars stop at the total number of votes a specific fruit got.

For example, if you look at the red bar, it stops at thirty-five, so this tells you thirty-five people voted for Apple as the nicest fruit.

You can tell by looking at the graph that Blueberry received the most votes (forty votes) and Grapes had the least amount of votes (five votes):

Using the graph above, tell your parent or teacher how many votes Orange got and how many votes Kiwi got. After sharing your answers, check your work below.

Orange got thirty votes and Kiwi got twenty-five votes.

You are beginning to learn how to read and interpret bar graphs. In the Got It? section, you will watch a video about bar graphs and play a graphing game.