Home > Student activities > National Maths Day > National Maths Day 2013 > Early years activities > Your place in the world: Food choices
Your place in the world: Food choices
What fruits do you like to eat?
Discuss with the students what fruits they like to eat.
Investigate which fruits are currently seasonal. For example, apples, bananas, mandarins and oranges are seasonal in August in southern Australia.
What fruit is your favourite?
Students survey their classmates and find out what fruits they like best.
Keeping this activity open-ended (by not placing restrictions on the amount of children surveyed, for example) will create a rich lesson that caters for individuals and provides valuable student-centred discussions.
How can we show which fruits are most popular on a graph? least popular?
This is an opportune time to complete either a whole class or small group directed learning activity around graphing. You can download a sample fruit graph and discuss what it shows.
Fruit tasting (optional)
Students could offer to bring in a fruit. They are then given the opportunity to taste each fruit and rank them from most to least favourite.
Students then collect and display data about their favourite fruit 'post-tasting'. Did the results change after tasting the fruits? If so, how and why might this have happened?
You can download the Food choices: Teacher notes.
Australian Curriculum links
Year 1
Represent data with objects and drawings where one object or drawing represents one data value. Describe the displays. (ACMSP263)
Year 2
Identify a question of interest based on one categorical variable. Gather data relevant to the question. (ACMSP048)
Collect, check and classify data. (ACMSP049)
Create displays of data using lists, table and picture graphs and interpret them. (ACMSP050)
