Reading and interpreting bar charts including those with different scales, finding values and comparing bars.
Where your child meets this in real life: Understanding survey results, comparing sports scores, or reading weather data
Each SEAG paper has 28 maths questions. Questions 29 to 50 are multiple choice with five possible answers, and questions 51 to 56 need a short written answer. With 56 questions in 60 minutes across English and maths, that is about a minute per question.
SEAGReady breaks read bar charts into 4 steps, taught in order so each skill builds on the last.
Read bar chart values when each grid line represents 1 unit
Read bar chart values when each grid line represents 2, 5, 10, or other multiples
Interpret bar charts where the vertical axis starts above zero (broken axis)
Select categories strictly greater than a threshold and add their bar frequencies.
Try three free questions from our read bar charts course. They start easy and get harder, so you can see where your child's confidence runs out. If they manage the last one without a hint, this topic is probably secure. If not, the steps above show where to start.
Mrs Kelly's P6 class voted for their favourite fruit. The bar chart shows the results. Each square on the scale represents 1 child. How many children voted for apples?
Millie made a bar chart of monthly rainfall. How much rain fell in April?
A newspaper bar chart shows company profits in millions of pounds. A headline says, 'Company A makes twice as much profit as Company B!' Why is this headline misleading?
This is the exact interactive worked example your child sees in SEAGReady. Step through it and watch the method build up.
A P6 class voted for their favourite lunch and made a bar chart to show the results.
How many more children voted for pizza than for sandwiches?
Find the pizza bar and read across to the scale
Step 1 of 4
A P6 class voted for their favourite lunch and made a bar chart to show the results.
How many more children voted for pizza than for sandwiches?
3 more children voted for pizza than sandwiches.
The key insight: On a unit scale, counting grid lines gives you the value directly!
Common mix-up: Reading pizza as 7 by counting spaces instead of lines. Count up from zero along the axis marks, not the gaps between them.
These are the misconceptions we see most often in read bar charts, including the ones our practice questions are specifically designed to catch.
Sitting the SEAG test this November? Read our last-month revision plan, Paper 1 vs Paper 2 and test day guide.
SEAGReady finds the exact step where your child gets stuck, teaches it with worked examples like the one above, and brings it back for review so it sticks.
Free to start · no card needed