From: Ben Pittenger (ben_pittenger@n2mail.com)
Date: Tue Aug 21 2001 - 12:22:39 PDT
Date: 21 Aug 2001 19:22:39 -0000 Message-ID: <20010821192239.26452.qmail@meowmix.chek.com> From: "Ben Pittenger" <ben_pittenger@n2mail.com> Subject: Re: 6th grade math project
Re: 6th grade math project
When I taught math I liked using floor plans for rooms or houses for the students to study length, area, volume, etc. There are any number of ways to go about it. It doesn't have to be a standard house; it could be a medieval castle, a tree house, a fantasy structure, or something to link with another class (what are they studying in social studies or what books are they reading in language arts?). They can start with simple rooms or spaces and progress to planning more complex spaces. You can have indoor and outdoor spaces, such as gardens. That way students can gravitate toward projects they would enjoy. Groups can be assigned a space, or everyone can work on all spaces.
I never got the whole project going, because I only taught math for one year. I had planned to develop the project so that I could assign easier rooms for the students who were struggling a bit more, and more difficult rooms for the students who were habitually ahead with their work. Depending on how advanced you want to get, they can calculate areas of walls, floors, windows, doors, etc. in order to plan the 'purchase' of paint, carpet, glass, etc. You could then have them price out supplies as though they were building the real thing. You can complicate things for more advanced students by giving them odd-shaped rooms (round rooms, or rooms with gables, etc. They can calculate volumes of rooms to plan for air-conditioning. They can figure out distances that pipes have to run to go from point A to point B. To get the technology part into the curriculum, you can use one of those software programs for designing homes. I found a couple of them cheap in a bin at COSTCO.
Ultimately, they could build a scale model of their structure as that final project!
Just a thought.
Ben Pittenger
____________________________________________
Sign up for your free web based email today!
http://www.n2mail.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Mon Aug 05 2002 - 09:21:35 PDT