The purpose of this activity is for students to make preparations to create their scale drawings. They sketch a rough floor plan of the classroom.
In groups, they plan the steps for making measurements and then carry out their plan. As students choose which aspects of the classroom they will include in their scale drawing, they are modeling with mathematics (MP4).

Some things to notice as students work:

• As they draw their sketch, encourage them to focus on big-picture elements and not on details. It is not important that the sketch is neat or elaborate. What matters more is that it does not omit important features like the door.

• As they make plans for measuring and recording, encourage them to work systematically to minimize omissions and errors.

• Urge students to measure twice and record once. It is better to take a little more time to double check the measurements than to find out during drawing that they are off.

After groups finish measuring, ask them to make sure that every group member has a copy of the measurements before moving on to the next part.

Consider briefly discussing what was challenging about doing the measuring. A few important issues that may come up include:

• Making sure that the measuring device stays in a straight line.
• It is hard to be accurate when the measuring device needs to be used multiple times in order to find the length of something long, such as a wall.
• Taking turns with other groups that are trying to measure the same thing.
• The measurements are not exact and need to be rounded.

In this activity, students use the measurements that they just gathered to create their scale floor plans. Each student selects one of the paper options, decides on a scale to use, and works individually to create a scale drawing. As students determine a scale that will work for their measurements and size of paper, they are making sense of problems and persevering in solving them (MP1).

Support students as they reason about scale, scaled lengths, and how to go about creating the drawing. Encourage all to pay attention to units as they calculate scaled lengths. Ask students to think about the different ways that we can write a scale. If they struggle, remind students that a scale can be written in different units or written without units.

Some students may pick a scale and start drawing without considering how large their completed floor plan will be. Encourage students to consider the size of their paper in order to determine an appropriate scale before they start drawing.

Small-group and whole-class reflections will occur in the next activity.

In the final phase of the drawing project, students reflect on their work. Students who chose the same paper option confer in small groups to analyze and compare their floor plans. They discuss their decisions, evaluate the accuracy of their drawings, and consider what revisions they might make. As students consider how they could improve their scale drawing, they are modeling with mathematics (MP4).

Then, students debrief as a class and discuss how the choice of scale, units, and paper affected the drawing process and the floor plans they created.

Though much of the discussion will take place within the groups, debrief as a class so students can see floor plans created at a variety of scales and on different paper types or sizes. Display a range of scale drawings for all to see and discuss the following questions. (Alternatively, consider posting all students’ work for a gallery walk.)

• “What is the same about these drawings? What is different?”
• “How did the size of paper impact the choice of scale?”
• “What choices were really important when creating the scale drawing?”
• “Would these choices be the same if you were doing a different room in the school? Or some other building?”