My friend is a 6th grade math teacher at a local middle school. Last week when I was visiting with her, she was grading some activity sheets her students completed in her math classes. She showed me the activity and I thought it was a great resource for students in the math content area.
The Build a City activity instructs students to build a city of their own on graph paper. The students will plot "landmarks" on their paper and find the distance between the different coordinates. This activity is a way for students to practice plotting and labeling coordinates as well as finding the distance between those coordinates. In addition to drawing their city, students will also write a story (about a paragraph long) about moving throughout their day to each landmark, including explaining the distance from one point to another.
I think middle school math teachers should check out this resource because it is a great curriculum material that promotes math literacy in the classroom. Not only do the students work with math concepts like coordinate planes and distance, they also practice writing and explaining their reasoning in words. This is a resource that I definitely want to use in my classroom, and it will be a template that I can also use to create other activities because I really like the structure of how students explain in a fun way what they did in the activity.
Link to Activity
Word Count: 239 words
No comments:
Post a Comment