Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Human Coordinate Graphing

Yesterday I introduced coordinate graphing to my regular math classes.  They learn coordinate graphing in sixth grade, so they come to 7th with a pretty good grasp of the concept.  There are some students, however, that struggle with remember which is the x or y coordinate, and sometimes forget whether to go up or down or right or left for + and -.

I am very fortunate that my classroom is right next to an exit door that is used for fire drills.  I am able to take my class outside at a moment's notice to do things like walk through the steps of human coordinate graphing.

For the x coordinate students walk right for positive and left for negative.  For the y coordinate they move forward (up) for positive and backward (down) for negative.  The whole class moves together and counts aloud as they move.  I make sure we throw in some zero coordinates so they realize that zero means they do not move.  

By sixth hour (my last class) the students were a little more wound up so I actually allowed some of the boys to leapfrog their coordinates.  They loved that!

I really feel this hands feet on activity helps struggling students to get a better grasp of this concept.  All the kids love going outside and moving around while doing math.  I always tell my students that my math class  is not a spectator sport, but full contact learning.  :)

4 comments:

  1. This is GREAT! Thanks for posting at Math Monday. Hope to see you there again!
    Cindy @ love2learn2day

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  2. What a great engaging activity! This will definitely be shared with my math team!

    Thank you for sharing!
    Cindy Rosa

    Follow me @cgrmath

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  3. Hello...thanks for posting this...but, can u explain clearly how to do that? please send me the explanation
    to allamah_ub@yahoo.co.id

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  4. This is a great idea! i remember in middle school, doing something similar to this. The floor was tile and we made the floor a graph instead. We put a pencil or a book on a point in the graph and then we would identify where it was on the graph (floor). It was really fun!

    ReplyDelete

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