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Thinking play

Family Data Survey

Child designs a survey question, collects answers from the household, and makes a simple chart of the results.

Cartoon illustration of a parent and child at home doing Family Data Survey.
  • Age7 to 12 years
  • Time15 to 30 minutes
  • EnergyCalm
  • CostFree
  • WhereIndoors
  • PrepNone

Your child comes up with one survey question, asks everyone in the household, records the answers, and turns them into a simple chart.

How to do it

  1. Help your child pick one clear question with a small set of possible answers, such as favourite fruit from a list of four.
  2. Have them write the question and the answer choices at the top of a tally sheet.
  3. Your child asks each person in the household and records each answer with a tally mark.
  4. When everyone has answered, help them count the tallies and draw a simple bar chart, one bar per answer.
  5. Look at the chart together and ask what it shows, such as which answer won and by how much.

What you need

  • Paper
  • Pencil
  • Ruler

Signs it is working

Your child writes a question with a fixed set of answers rather than an open-ended one. They use one tally per person and do not double-count. They can read the finished chart and say which answer was most and least popular

If it is not quite clicking

The question is too open and every answer is different: Help them regroup the answers into a few categories or rewrite it with set choices. The household is small and the chart looks thin: Let them survey a few neighbours or relatives by phone too. Drawing the bars is fiddly: Use a row of stickers or coloured squares instead of ruled bars

Make it yours

Younger (6 to 8 years): Offer just two answer choices and help with the counting. Older (10 to 12 years): Survey more people, add a second question, and compare the two charts. Make it the child's own: Let them choose a question they genuinely wonder about the family (who likes what, who does what), then share the finished chart at dinner and talk about the surprises together, so it becomes a real conversation they lead rather than a worksheet. Siblings: One child asks and another tallies, then they build the chart together

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