Making A Tally Chart

Tally charts are very easy to make, and very easy to use! First, separate the space you are working with into rows and columns. On one side, or on top if preferred, we list our categories. If asking the question, "Where is your favorite place to read?", the categories would be the answers or options for that question.

Leave enough space to record the data as you discover it. An additional column for the frequency (number of instances of a specific data value) is often added for ease of reading after all the information has been collected. You will also hear tally charts referred to as Frequency Tables.

Students can get data through a survey, asking the same question(s) of different people, or by witnessing events over a period of time.

As you gather information, you make tally marks on your chart. For each response, we mark a single vertical line, like a lowercase letter “L”. When you reach the fifth data point, the notation changes slightly; instead of continuing to use vertical lines, every fifth data point is a diagonal slash across four vertical tally marks. It is an easy visual cue to see the data organized into groups of five. Have your students practice their skip-counting to get the totals for each category!