Scale Drawing and Literacy

My main goal this year has been to incorporate more and more literacy within my mathematics instruction.  I have posted about how I use articles, info graphs, and vocabulary activities to support literacy in mathematics.  This year while I was teaching ratios and scale, I decided to tweak my cartoon scale drawing project a bit.  I usually have students pick a cartoon figure and then we use ratios to enlarge the figure on graph paper.  It always allows my creative students to shine a bit, and it still allows me to make sure they understand the concept of scale.  This year, I had students take comic strips that were related to mathematics and scale draw them larger.


Many of the cartoons incorporated figurative language with a mathematical concept, so I had students explain how the artist used figurative language in the comic and explain the mathematical concept.  It was awesome!  Some of the comic strips were so funny and cute, and the students seemed to really enjoy them.

Here are a few examples of the comic strips students enlarged. I will post the write ups where the students described the figurative language shortly.