Drawing a column graph is four small moves, and none of them is hard. Start from a frequency table — a list of categories and how many times each one came up — and you've already done the thinking.
The Four Moves
One — set up the axes. The bottom (the x-axis) carries your categories: dog, cat, fish, bird. The side (the y-axis) carries the count, evenly spaced: 0, 1, 2, 3 … all the way past your biggest number.
Two — draw a bar for each category, as tall as its count. Seven dogs? The dog bar reaches the 7 line. That's the whole trick: the height is the number.
Three — leave gaps between the bars. The categories are separate things, so the bars don't touch. (Save touching bars for a histogram, which is a Year 8 cousin for grouped numbers.)
Four — label both axes and give it a title. An unlabelled graph is a riddle.
A Worked One
Say the pet survey reads dog 7, cat 5, fish 3, bird 2. You mark the y-axis up to 8, write the four pets along the bottom, then draw bars to 7, 5, 3 and 2. Title it "Pets owned by 8C", label the side "Number of students" and the bottom "Pet". Done — and anyone glancing at it instantly sees dogs win.
Dot Plots Are the Same Idea
If your numbers are small, a dot plot is even quicker: instead of a bar to 7, you stack 7 dots above "dog". Same data, same heights — you're just counting dots instead of reading a bar against a scale.