Confession: I love doing art projects in my classes. I love seeing the kids create and color in class. I also love hanging their work in my classroom. :)
We recently finished our unit on similarity and we had one week between the end of the unit and the beginning of our official review week. I didn't want to begin a new unit right before mid-year exams. Anyway, I have seen scale drawing projects before and thought it would be great to reinforce what we had been doing in class. Everything turned out better than I expected!
This is what I did:
1. I chose several math comic strips. If you want ideas, you can check out my "Math Comics and Quotes" Pinterest board. All of the ones I chose were FoxTrot, but any comics could be used. Then, I cut out the individual squares. I didn't tell the students that the squares would make comic strips. They figured it out, but I didn't talk to them about it. I think it made it a little more fun in the end. This was a great idea by Mrs. AwesomeGeometryTeacherFriend.
2. I gave the kids some suggestions of scale factors that would work well, but they had to choose one on their own. Then, they drew a grid on the comic and also lightly on their paper. They used rulers to draw straight perpendicular lines.
3. The students began copying each box of the comic onto their paper.
4. When they were finished "drawing", they outlined everything in black marker and erased any stray pencil marks and the gridlines.
5. Then, they colored the comic the same as the original.
6. When they were finished, I cut out each square and assembled them into the comic strips. I plan to laminate them together and hang them on the wall.
Some of the finished products are below. You can see the individual comic and also see how they fit together into a comic strip.
I really liked this because it was different than what we normally do in class, but still had the mathematical aspect. I loved seeing the awesome finished drawings from kids that "can't draw"!
