Pictograph Activities for Kindergarten – Leaf Chart

Pictograph Activities for Kindergarten

This is one of my favourite pictograph activities for Kindergarten as it can be done outside. Pictographs are simple visual representations of statistics/data on a chart. Making a pictograph with leaves can be a great way to introduce children to data handling. It is a lot of fun as they can move the objects around themselves. This activity involves sorting and categorizing, as the leaves must be divided up based on a specified attribute or characteristic. It also requires children to count, as they must count how many leaves are in each category. Additionally, they can compare the values to see which category has the most or the least number of leaves, or they place the leaves in order based on their value.  Pictographs or data graphs provide children with the opportunity to begin seeing what information might be useful to represent in a visual way. They make it easy to quickly obtain information that they may need.

What you need

• Sidewalk Chalk (different colours)
• A range of different leaves (shapes, sizes, colours)

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Questions to ask

• How many red, yellow, brown, etc. leaves are there?
• Are there more yellow or red leaves?
• Which column (e.g. which leaf colour) has the most leaves (the greatest value)? Which has the least number of leaves?
• Can this tell you something about the trees/leaves this time of year? Why or why not?
• Can you think of another way we can sort the leaves and place them into a pictograph?

What they get from pictograph activities

This is a hands-on way for children to create a data chart making it fun and engaging for them. As part of the process of making a pictograph children will engage in several types of maths. They will sort leaves based on their colour (or other chosen characteristic), engage in counting, and compare heights and values.

Take it further

Children could think about different ways to sort leaves based on characteristics such as their edges (e.g. smooth, lobed or serrated) or shape. Also see my Autumn Leaf Activities for Children Post for further leaf activity ideas.

See my post on Venn Diagrams with leaves for another form of data handling.

Children could make a larger data graph based on the number of points a leaf has (e.g. a holly leaf). Holly leaves have a wide range in the number of points they have so this can be a much larger pictograph that involves more counting. See my Holly Leaf Pictograph (Coming soon) post.