As national census day only comes around once every ten years we felt it was a significant event that should be acknowledged in school and used to inspire learning in lots of different subject areas including maths, literacy, history and geography. 

Here is a  snippet of information from each class to give you a flavour of the learning that took place on the Friday before Sunday’s census. 

‘Ash Class explored numbers in lots of different ways, creating a class bar graph of boys/girls/Reception/Year 1 children in the class as well as well as a class pictogram showing the types and numbers of pets owned by children.  The year one children also completed their own individual census information sheet. ’

‘As Beech Class have been learning about endangered animals, they decided to count the different types of animals that they could find outside. The children found lots of birds and bugs but only saw a few bees, so they talked about what they could do to encourage more bees into the school area.’

‘Hawthorn really enjoyed measuring themselves as part of Census day.  They measured their hands, heads, feet and height.  They then counted to see how many of them had grown since September and put this information in a pictogram.’

‘Juniper Class decided they wanted to find out how many types of pets could be found in their households and added more data by distinguishing between boys and girls.  They recorded their results in a tally chart and then transferred the data into either a pictogram or bar chart.  They discovered that three members of the class had some unusual pets!’

‘Willow class looked at some examples of census information and put their historian hats on to find what it told them about the families that lived at the address. They then looked at equality and representation within the census. Identifying the key questions, they looked at the addition of ethnicity to the census in 1991 and then studied an example of the Stroud data through the Nomis website.’