Scale Drawing

I am currently teaching one of my favorite chapters in pre-algebra.  It is all about proportions and part of that is scale drawings.  Each year I teach this, I truly feel like I teach it better and more clearly.  It really is amazing to step back and watch yourself grow as a teacher.  Anyways, this year I wanted to have students make their own scale drawing.  At first I considered having students create a scale drawing of a buildings in this Chicago skyline which would then be displayed outside my classroom.  However, after more thought I concluded it would be hard to make the buildings look as realistic as I would have wanted.   So instead, I thought I would incorporate a piece of art.  I went with this idea because I do have an interest in art and because I try to expose my students to it as much as possible since we no longer have an art teacher.  Anyways, I chose Composition A by Piet Mondrian.  As a class, we assessed the amount of space we had for our artwork and determined a starting ratio for our proportion.  From there,  I had students work in groups to draw a set of rectangles according to our first ratio.  I would definitely do this project again!  Here is the final product :)

Common Core Math Standards:

Analyze proportional relationships and use them to solve real-world and mathematical problems.

2.  Recognize and represent proportional relationships between quantities.

Objectives:

Students will:

-identify Piet Mondrian's artwork 

-determine the new size of part of the artwork using proportions

Assessment:

Students were assessed based on the accuracy of their calculations.