Year 10 Reflection - Floor Plans

So, today the year 10's started to create floorplans for their architectural design.

This was an interesting lesson, becuase once again, I under estimated how much I had to break information down. I also need to consciously remember that all of this type of work (floorplans and sketching ideas) comes naturally to me, and that I do this stuff - and have always done this stuff - in my spare time becuase I love it, so of course it is easy.

Heres how the lesson went:

- Introduction of brief, check students know how to work out the area of a face

- YES! Students know how to work out an area of a face.

- We have 50m square to work with. Check with students what a square would measure to equal 50.

- Go outside to walk out the perimeter of a square that equals 50m square total. Groups of four, one student at every corner.

- Get students to draw up a grid where each square in that grid equals 1m x 1m. The size of this grid does not matter, the thing that matters is that that maintain the use of 50 total squares

- Demonstrate this over the projector.

- Check with students how many meters square we have to work with

- Demonstrate how the process of making a floorplan may go over the projector (6m square here plus 10m square there equals... How many do we have left now to work with... so on, so fourth.

- Students a encouraged to draw their own grids and begin the process of creating a floorplan.

PROBLEM:

- Students drew grids and complained of the sketching, "Can we use rulers Miss?"

- Then, when I let them use rulers, they were too concerned with getting each row and column perfect

- Students drew grids that were bigger than the total overall meter squarage than they allowed. Then they filled up this ENTIRE grid with the begginings of their design

- So, 2/3rds of the class had floorplans that were bigger then the total allowed space

- Kids asked me "Miss, why did you tell us that the size of our grid did not matter when in fact it did?"

- I went around to the kids that were confused, and explained (with an example) why they did not have to only draw 50 squares (it gives them the freedom to design outside of the shape of a 10x5 rectangle

- Because more than half the class were confused, this is how I know I have set the bar too high, adn am expecting too much AND most likely did not explain something along the way.

WHAT I WILL DO NEXT TIME:

- Slow down the demonstration on the visualiser and ask general questions to the class about what I am doing, and get the students to answer so the others in the class can see the answers from their peers as I do it

- EXPLAIN the WHY we make a grid larger than the maximum size of our design, slow down, do one together. Maybe even get the kids to draw a 10x5 grid, and then once they have filled that out, show them the 'remove bits here, put bits there' part of the process

KEY: Never, underestimate how little others know about a subject. Gets me every time.

#reflection