Tally Charts

This lesson was contributed by:

Karen Galea Primary Maths Support Team

This lesson is for:

Lesson Duration:

45 mins.

What should you expect from this lesson?

This lesson aims to help students sort, organize and classify data in a tally chart. Drawing tally marks should be appreciated as an easy and organized way of keeping count. Students should understand that tally marks are organized in groups of five, as in this way keeping track of the total is much easier. Important key words during lesson: Tally Charts, Tally Marks , Frequency. Point of Interest: Humans were making tally marks on wood and bone as a means of counting, as early as 40,000 years ago.

Print this lesson

Press the button to print this lesson

Share on print
Print

How to carry out this lesson at home:

Step 1:   Introduction to Tally Marks (number of tally marks is less than 5)
Present the students with an amount of items which is less than 5, say with 3 apples. Tell them to count the items and while they are counting them, draw 3 tally marks on a piece of paper.

3 Tally Marks

Step 2:    Presenting a Further Example with Less than 5 tally Marks
Present the students with another amount of items, again less than 5, say with 4 apples. Tell them to count the items and while they are counting, draw 4 tally marks on a piece of paper.

4 Tally Marks

Step 3:   Representing 5 items with tally marks

Now present the students with 5 items, say with 5 apples. Tell them to count them and whilst they are counting draw the tally marks. Explain that the fifth tally mark is drawn across the previous four tally marks as shown below.

5 Tally Marks

Step 4:   Representing numbers 1-10 with Tally Marks
It is a good idea at this point to watch the video attached to the lesson. Click here to watch video.  Now it is time to ask students to represent numbers 1-10 with tally marks. They should be able to represent a quantity of 10 into two groups of 5 tally marks, with the fifth tally mark drawn across the previous 4 tally marks, each time.

Tally Marks for numbers 1-10

Step 5:   Creating a Tally Chart including the word Frequency
Encourage students to create tally charts of their own. The items classified in the tally chart need to have something in common yet they are different. For example they can create a tally chart of different fruits, different books, different coloured items, different clothes, different shoes etc. A tally chart can contain a column named frequency. Frequency shows the number of items in each group. The numbers written in the frequency column have to match the number of tally marks, each time.

Favourite Colours Tally Chart including Frequency Column

Step 6:   Task to consolidate understanding of Tally Charts
The lesson could be completed by practising some more through this worksheet .

Share this lesson

If you enjoyed this, or think this is a great lesson, please feel free to share it on your social media tools.

Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on whatsapp
WhatsApp