BattleGraph

     A few weeks ago, the fifth grade teacher I am working with asked me to teach a lesson practicing plotting ordered pairs on a coordinate graph. She had introduced the new concept the day before, and the students certainly needed more practice. I found this game online that is very similar to the Battleship I grew up playing, except it was adapted for teaching coordinate graphs. This awesome PowerPoint was made by Sarah Grabowski.

     Originally, I was going to change it a little bit so that my students only had to graph positive ordered pairs (that's all the standard asked for), but my teacher said she had taught them to graph positive and negative numbers, so I didn't have to change anything. One additional requirement that I did make was that they had to write on the blank part of their hidden board all of the ordered pairs of the locations of their ships. This allowed me time to walk around and see who was understanding coordinates and who needed more help. I also had them play on the same team as a partner so that they could figure out where the point needed to go together (they still each had to fill out their own board).

    The students loved this game! Unfortunately, it took a little while to get set up, so no one finished it before library time, but my teacher said they would finish it another day. I love math lessons/activities like this where students can practice and have fun with it. Too often I see these students hate math, which I believe is very sad as math was usually my favorite subject.