Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Pet Project

Grady and I are studying ancient Egypt.  In our studies, we discovered that families in ancient Egypt kept a lot of the same kind of pets as they do today (with the notable exception of monkeys).  A suggested activity in the book we were reading was to survey people we knew about the kind of pets they have and make a bar graph to show what we discovered.  I posted our query to Facebook and my FB family and friends rose to the challenge admirably.  30 people responded to our survey and it was interesting to see what kind of animals you all included in your family.  Also, several people included wildlife living on their property, so we tried to reflect that on the graph as well.

As we talked about how to interpret the data we collected, we decided the most accurate depiction would be to show how many households include each kind of pet, rather than the number of animals of each kind.  Many families had more than one dog or cat and one family who owns a farm has 7 chickens and 11 ducks, and that would just look misleading.  Also, in the interest of saving space, several kinds of animals were included in the catagory "other", including: geese, monarch caterpillar cocoons, a blue heron and a beaver.  According to our system of counting each kind of animal per family one time, we plotted this on the graph as a 4.  The rest of the results should speak for themselves.


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