Here is a tally someone made on a clipboard. Count the marks: three full gates of five, then two more single strokes. How many is that altogether? And here are three questions a class might want to answer: "How do we get to school?", "What is your favourite colour?", "Will it rain tomorrow?" Which of these three could we actually answer by counting?

We will draw a completed tally for how we get to school, sorted into Walk, Cycle, Bus and Car. Notice how every fifth mark crosses the other four to make a gate, and see how quickly the gates let us read a total.

Today we draft a brand-new question together: "What is your favourite playground game?" First we name the categories — call them out and we will write a row for each. Then individual pupils come to the board to add a tally mark in turn, and the whole class watches each fifth mark cross the four before it. The frequency column on the right fills in as we go.

Today we do some real counting together. First we find a good spot to watch from — the classroom window is perfect. Then we pick a question that fits what we can see, like "What colour are the cars going by?" or "What colour jumpers are people wearing?" We tally what we see in fives for a couple of minutes, then bring our count back to the board and read off the frequency for each group together from the tally chart.

What we did today

• Posed a question we can answer by counting into clear categories
• Tallied in fives, crossing every fifth mark as a gate
• Converted each tally into a frequency in a table