Grade: 9th grade Math.
Number of students: 15
Length of lesson: 2 hrs. per activity
Objective:
The pre-and-post activities will be designed to help students understand the built environment and to begin looking at their city as a resource of history. My ultimate goal, however, is to have them draw the actual Brooklyn Bridge to scale, and build a small replica of the suspension bridge.
Development:
This unit will introduce students to style and structures pertaining to building-construction issues. After the field trip, the students will have a clearer idea of what they are going to build. Students will gather all the written information from the beginning of the semester and the field trip and proposed ways to make a scale model of the bridge using all their drawings and sketches. The brainstorming will help them use their knowledge of structure, engineering & architecture to create a small-scale model of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Activities:
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1. Back in the classroom students will start to refine their sketches of the structures, much like architects and engineers do, in an effort to better understand the scope of their project. Some drawings will be done from memory, others by utilizing reference photos taken by the students at the site. Other drawings will utilize books and photocopies of the bridge collected from different books (See students bibliography).
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2. Students will sketch their bridge to decide on the type and amount of materials to be use to represent the small-scale model of the Brooklyn Bridge. Once the model is finished, students will present them to other classmates or classes. This will allow them to have some experience in building, displaying the bridge, and making presentations for their final project and evaluate their achievements.
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3. Students then will proceed to draw on paper a 2D and 3D small scale model of The Brooklyn Bridge.
Vocabulary
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• 2D and 3D figures
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• congruency
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• data displays
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• polygons
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• rotations
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• similarity
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• translation
Follow up activity
Model Making of the Brooklyn Bridge