Pies and Percentages - Learning About Pie Graphs

Summary
Activity A gives them the opportunity to practice working out the percentage of a section of a circle while Activity B requires them to draw their own pie graph using the data.

Objectives
• The children will be able to construct a pie graph from a set of data.

• The children will be able to interpret a pie graph.

Suggested Grades
6th Grade

Excerpt
Today, we?re going to look at a different type of graph. A pie graph is shaped like a circle and is divided into pieces that look a little like slices of pie. Each slice shows what percent of the total amount it is. So, for a pie graph to work properly all the slices should add up to 100%. The slices are usually in different colors with a key showing what each color stands for.

When you read a pie graph, the figures are usually given to you and it is quite easy to see how each piece of data compares with the next. For example, in this pie graph we can see that almost half of the vehicles counted are cars, that there are less motor cycles than any other vehicle and that there
are almost as many buses as there are trucks.

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