Primary 3 Bar Graphs Made Easy

In this Practicle “Bar graphs for kids” guide, we are going to teach you everything you need to know to help your child when they are learning bar graphs in Primary 3.

What is a bar graph?

A bar graph is a picture that is made up of bars with different height. Each bar represents a different category. The height of each bar can tell us how often something happens or show us the number of items we have for each group. Now let’s see what we can use bar graphs for. Say you wanted to find out what your friends are doing at home during Covid. After carrying out a survey, you can put your results into a table like this:

Well, that’s one way of showing the data that you’ve collected. Another way would be to present the results in a more visual style using a bar graph. This is how a bar graph looks like:

This bar graph has a few rectangular bars and we can make a lot of inferences by comparing the bars. Let’s learn how to read this bar graph to extract the information in the next example.

How to read bar graphs

Bar graph example #1:

Reading bar graphs is really easy. First, we’ll start with the title. Reading the title of the graph will tell us what the bar graph is all about. This bar graph shows all the activities that a number of children are doing at home. Next, we are going to look at both the horizontal line and the vertical line. The vertical line (also known as the y-axis) will show some numbers on a scale while the horizontal axis ((also known as the x-axis) will show us what categories we are looking at. When we look at the vertical line of this bar graph, we can see that each space represents 2 children. What about the horizontal line of the graph? Well, you’ll see that the children are grouped according to the activities they did.

Bar graph example #2:

Here’s another table with some different information. How do we make a simple bar graph with this?

Once again, we are given the activities that a number of children are doing at home, so this should be the title of our bar graph.

Next, let’s think about what goes on the horizontal line and the vertical line. Looking at the table, we have different groups of children doing different things, right? And we are given the exact number of children in each group. So those 2 will be on each side of the graph.

Look at the vertical line of the graph. This time, 1 space on the vertical line represents a different value. Instead representing 2 children with a space, we now represent 10 children with 2 spaces. Each space represents 5 children.

Bar graphs can be horizontal too!

So far, the bar graphs examples that we have seen have vertical bars. Do you know that the bars can be horizontal too? Here’s how we draw a horizontal bar graph with the same information by flipping the axes.

Notice how we can use different scales to represent the number of children? In this example, we now have 5 spaces representing 5 children on the vertical axis, so each space represents 1 child.

Give your Primary 3 child more bar graph practice

Now that your child knows how to read a bar graph and compare the bars, the best way to make it stick is practice. Explore the full Primary 3 Singapore Math curriculum to see what else your child will learn this year, or start a free 7-day Practicle trial for more bar graph questions with worked solutions and video explanations.