Exploring Coordinate Grids

My third graders started to explore coordinate grids this week. For many, this was the first time that they’ve used them. Some of the students have played Battleship or some other game that involves a grids.  Playing off that background knowledge, I used a road map to show how people can find certain locations by using a coordinate grid. This made sense to some of the students but a few still were unsure of what axis was used first to determine where to plot a point.  This was a reoccurring theme throughout the lesson.

During this process I remembered a strategy that another colleague suggested a few years ago. She borrowed the idea from another teacher and it seemed to work well in her classroom. A colleague of mine used (3,2) as an example of the “go into the building” – first number (right 3) and then “go up or down the elevator” (up 2) method. I decided to use that strategy and a few more students started to grasp the process.  The next activity in the paragraphs below seemed to solidify a better understanding for the rest of the class.

Earlier in the day I created a very short Nearpod lesson involving mostly pictures of coordinate grids. I handed out a iPad to each student. Students logged in and given a picture of a grid and asked to draw and label points.

I then revealed the pictures to the class on the whiteboard. The names of the students were hidden so that we could analyze each response without throwing judgement lightning bolts towards a specific individual. As the class went through each picture they started to notice trends.

• Some were switching up the x and y-axis numbers
• Some were not creating a point
• Some were not creating a letter for the point
• Some were confused by the negative sign in front of the numbers

Students observed these issues from the first question and grid. After a decent discussion on the above trends, the class moved towards the second grid and question. I gave the students that same amount of time and the results seemed to initially improve.

Students started to become better at finding their own mistakes before submitting their creations. I used the same strategy as earlier and displayed the results to the class. There were a few that had some of the same misconceptions, but not as many. In fact, many students vocalized the class improvement since the last question. One of the evident misconceptions revolved around students having trouble plotting negative numbers on the coordinate grid. The class discussed this and completed the third question and grid. The student responses from this question were much better than the prior two. Students were starting to develop some true confidence in being able to correctly plot points on a coordinate grid. I kept a list of the trends that students noticed and will bring it out later in the unit as we’ll be revisiting coordinate grids next week.

After our Nearpod lesson (which was about 15-20 minutes) students played a Kahoot on identifying points on a coordinate grid. I felt like this was helpful as students identified the points and were able to gauge their own understanding compared to the goal.