Yesterday we had fun learning how to build and how to read charts.
A chart is one of the few things in primary school maths that is then used for the rest of your life, unchanged. It is also one of the few lessons that works in both directions: first the children gather data and turn it into a picture, then they look at a picture and pull the information back out of it. The second direction is the hard one — looking at a drawing and saying what it means, not just what it shows.
We started from data the children already had, because a chart is far easier to understand when the numbers in it are your own. We built the columns, compared them and asked the questions that matter: which is the biggest, by how much do they differ, what would change if we added one more.
Activities like this do not only teach children maths. They develop logical thinking, problem solving and the grasp of more complex ideas, but above all they accustom the eye to the notion that information can be arranged in many ways — and that sometimes the arrangement changes what you understand from it.
About the after-school programme: https://pluskids.ro/en/after-school