Fourth Grade Dream House Project

Fourth graders recently finished creating the floor plans for their dream house project, a fun, hands-on project that was an extension of our study of area and perimeter.  The guidelines set out were that each one story house needed to have between eight and twelve rooms and that at least half of the rooms needed to be irregular shapes, with the other half being squares or rectangles.

We had recently learned how to find the area of irregular shapes and we wanted the students to apply what they had learned.  We also stressed the importance of knowing your multiplication facts when finding the area of a rectangle or square because it is much easier to count the length and width and multiply than it is to count each square on the blue print grid!

After creating a blue print on grid paper, students transferred their plans onto construction paper.  They measured each room using centimeters and then carefully cut out the rooms and placed them onto their poster.  Many students found that once the rooms were cut, a couple of them did not quite fit, and they then had to go back and remeasure and cut one or more rooms.  All of the students were very invested in the final outcome of their dream house poster and so their willingness to redo rooms that weren't measured or cut quite right wasn't surprising.

The dream house posters will soon be hanging up in both fourth grade rooms, so make sure to check them out!