Looking for ideas on teaching scale drawings? You’re in the right place! Scale drawings can be so much fun for students, and they’re definitely a fun way to look at math. In this post you’ll find 8 engaging scale drawing activities to practice in your classroom. For even more scale drawing ideas & tips, check out this post about using I Can Statements to break down teaching scale drawings. Or, for a guide to introducing scale drawings through discovery & interactive notes, check out this post. The eight scale drawing activities below include independent practice opportunities, technology-based tools, review games, and enrichment activities. Let’s dig in!
The 8 scale drawing activities are:
- A coloring activity
- Interactive computer activity
- A whole class knockout game
- 2 internet games
- A collection of worksheets
- Performance tasks
- An extended project
Practice activities
There are many ways to practice any concept. Finding a good combination for modeling, practicing, and reinforcing learning is the art of being a teacher. Below, I’ve included some activities that I use while teaching this concept. They work for different parts of the lesson like anticipatory set, modeling, practice, and closure. You can mix and match them to work for your students. This variety of approaches can be used as math centers, partner work, independent work, or with the whole class depending on the activity.
Coloring page for independent practice
This Scale Drawings Coloring Activity (2 Pages) engages students by having the fun of coloring a picture while they complete their work. It makes it easy for the teacher to monitor progress. In my experience, students don’t want to get the answers wrong so they’ll check with the teacher to make sure they’re correct before coloring the image. This is a great opportunity to give feedback and take note of who gets it, and who still is missing a piece. This particular coloring activity has 12 problems, all short story problems. They’d be good to use with an annotating strategy like the one we use with this foldable. I would use this activity after notes are taken as a first round of independent practice.
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Fast finishers
Every class has some students who finish before everyone else and it can be had to always have something for them to do. During scale drawings practice, this activity from Glencoe is something that students can do on their own with a computer. The program basically walks them through a couple of hands-on activities of scale drawings in real life. It’s something that students who are fast finishers should be able to complete on their own. This activity will challenge students a little, but not too much.
More independent practice for scale drawing
I like to use computer games for some independent practice. Many of them can be found on the internet for free. You’ll want to preview any game before you assign it to students because students will ask you questions about it and you want to make sure it’s high quality.
The following links are computer-based games that students can play to reinforce this topic. They’re free and I find that students really get motivated when they can practice on the computer, especially when there’s a game involved. These would be great for anticipatory sets, fast finishers, or independent practice. Students really seem to get excited when they can play games together, so you might want to let them complete the game with a friend.
Scale Factory X-Proportional Reasoning
The scale factory x- game from Math Playground is a fun game that has students working with proportions. It also lets students play in a video game format where they collect keys and solve missions. I use this as an anticipatory set and then let students go back to it if they finish their assignment early. My kids love games like this.
Scale Drawings and Scale Factor Game
This game from Math Playground is much less game-like than the first one. It’s a collection of story problems and students can enter their answer and see if they’re right or wrong. Partners can play this. If they get a question right they could roll a dice or spin a spinner to see how many points they get. You could also use this with the whole class and have students keep track of their stars as they answer the questions. The questions are simple and they’re already prepared for you.
Practice with a whole class game- Scale drawings knockout game
One great way to review for a test or to see how the class is doing is through playing whole class games. My favorite class review game is called Knockout. This game can be played with or without an interactive whiteboard. All you need to have is a projector.
This scale drawings knockout game has a fun Taco Tuesday theme which middle school students love. The questions consist of a variety of short story problems, a couple of shape problems, and a couple of questions with fractions and decimals.
This is how it’s played:
To play, I project the game screen onto the front board and all students have a whiteboard. A student chooses an icon revealing a scale drawings problem. A student chooses one of the items on this screen:
Then, their choice leads to a question or problem. All students solve the problem on their white board.
All students answer the question on either a printed scorecard or a whiteboard. Then, we reveal the answer and students keep track of their points for the problems they get right. I don’t emphasize the points very much, but many students love the points side of the game. When needed, I coach students through the problems if they seem to be struggling. You then will go back to the first board and choose another item that leads to a question. To add some fun there are some bonuses.
When they get to the bonus page they have three choices. Whichever one they choose will lead to a good or a bad bonus.
The kids love the bonuses, especially the negative ones. They think it is very funny and therefore they are more engaged in the game. Just today we played this game and near the end of the game one student got the bonus and he got the surprise of losing all of his points. Everyone chuckled including the student and it was silly because there really is nothing attached to the points. The stakes are low, but my students still get into it.
We play this type of game the day before or the day of a test. These games work as a final boost before the test. You can get this scale drawing knockout game in our TPT store.
Remediation
The students that I work with usually need more practice than the average bear. During this particular unit I used something that I bought on TPT to give students more practice. It was a set of worksheets from Math on the Move. I really liked this resource because it was easy to understand and simple. When I had to go back and reteach part of this concept, these assignments were easy for me to get ready. All I had to do was print and go.
Challenge activity
I’m a math specialist and I’m also a math coach on my campus. We’ve been struggling this year to make sure that we are pushing all students. Sometimes we seem to be teaching to the middle and not pushing everyone as far as they can go. I’ve looked into a lot of resources to help find challenging problems for students. The best source I found was Illustrative Mathematics. They have multiple performance tasks on almost every topic. They have 6 performance tasks for scale drawings. These activities are easy to bring into the classroom and offer a great challenge for students.
Extended project
There are a lot of extended real world projects that would work with this topic. One of the them is to take a candy bar wrapper and to make a scale drawing that’s 10 times larger than the original. Another very popular project related to scale drawings is to recreate a room or house in a scaled down drawing. These types of activities are something that I don’t have time to do until after our state testing in April, but this is one that we will do for sure in my 7th grade class. Check out this candy bar wrapper activity from Fast Times of a Middle School Math Teacher:
Putting it all together
There’s never enough time to do all of the activities that I want to do with my students. For this topic in particular we only had 4 days to teach it and test it. I’m going to save some of these ideas for later in the year when I have more time to go deeper into this topic. I can’t wait.
Check out our activity pack for five great scale drawing activities & resources at a great discoung. It includes two games I talked about above, the discovery lab and foldable notes I talked about here, and the task cards I showed you here. Thanks for reading! Until next time!
