Week 20 – Graphing and Cartesian Plane

** the Alberta curriculum has grade six students only working within one quadrant of the
Cartesian plan. Having done 4 quadrants with grade six students (during home learning), I think
the curriuculum underestimates their abilities and I found it easier to teach in four quadrants than
one.
The goal this week is for kids to be comfortable with ordered pairs in the Cartesian plane and for
them to be able to create and interpret line graphs.
Day one – Battleship and other games
Goal
- Play with ordered pairs in order to familiarize/strengthen conceptual understanding
Delivery
- There are a few options here
o I’ve seen teachers physically create battleship games with painter’s tape on the
floor and shower curtains. You could use solo cups as the “ships” and have a list
on the board of the ships you can have (and their size)
o You could partner students up and have them create graphs on whiteboards. They
can use two boards (one for their hits and misses, one for their opponents)
o There are online versions of Battleship
- Other games:

Day Two – Cartesian plane code breaking

Goal
- Play with ordered pairs and Cartesian Planes in order for kids to practice (this is an
alternative to a Cartesian plane worksheet)
Delivery
- Random partners, each partner with a printout of the code
 - Every letter sits on at least two different ordered pairs. Students can create a message for
their partner and they would have to use the handout to crack the code.
o Example: (-4, 2) (3, 3) (4, 2) (5, 2) (-2,0) = HELLO
- Have students create messages for each other, then trade and decipher messages.
Day 3 – Cartesian plane patterns
Goal
- Students find patterns in ordered pairs
Subordinated Tasks
- Pattern recognition
- Estimation
- Integers
Delivery
- Partners, each group with one copy of Cartesian plane patterns, kids solve in books or on
google docs
- I created these in Google docs, here is the link to open them:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Q7qXkjbXiX5R8RlvSNd-ucj98LZm-
iwuBCOwSmF4uJg/edit?usp=sharing
- Students can go through the doc to solve the problems, then use paper copies to create
their own patterns
Day 4 – Line Graphs
Goal
- Read and interpret line graphs
Subordinated tasks
- Critical thinking
 - Social studies or social tie-ins, depending on the graphs you choose
Delivery
- Table groups for discussion
- You’re going to do two things today – show line graphs and have students talk about
them AND set up tomorrow’s lesson of making line graphs.
o Start having students track something today (for the whole school day, if you
can). It needs to be something quantifiable, like how hungry are you? Or, To what
level are you engaged/paying attention (1-5 scales). Have students keep track of
this every hour for the school day and for tomorrow as well. If you’re so inclined,
have them record at home tonight too.
- Line graphs show change (pos or neg) over time. This is why they’re valuable for
learning. Find as many line graphs as you can on these grade six-relevant subjects
o Animal population
o Youtube views
o Amount of CO 2 in the air
o Weather patterns
 Heat
 Precipitation
- Get a smattering of different kinds of line graphs, especially some with mulitple lines
- Questions to ask kids about line graphs
o What does this graph tell us?
o What can we learn from this graph?
o If you were a teacher, what are some questions you could ask if you gave students
this graph?
o How would this information change if this was a bar graph?
o Could this be another type of graph, like a pie graph?
- Cover up the title of some graphs and ask kids to predict what the graph is about
Day 5 – Making line graphs
Goal
- Read and interpret line graphs

Delivery
- Table groups for discussion
- Have different options for kids to create graphs on
o Full grids
o Only horizontal lines
o Just the x and y axis
- Kids have been tracking something for about one day, have them create a line graph
about it
o What goes on the x-axis?
o What goes on the y?
o If you had them do this over several days, have them create lines in different
colours for each day.