[kristeacher]

I am new to teaching fourth grade and this year I was thinking of doing monthly math projects. These projects could be creating cars and measuring speed, mapping out a trip within the state, or even designing an apartment and looking at area. Does anyone have any suggestions or websites that would help. I was thinking the projects would last 2-3 days.
Thanks for your help with this.

[debjr]

I am new to teaching but I love the idea you have. I hope to hear some ideas as well. When doing area I like to have students pretend to be architects and design their dream bedroom. Usually they have difficulty figuring out how to draw things to scale though.

[kristeacher]

I was thinking about giving the kids a template of furniture that had to fit in the house. This could be given or students could draw them on graph paper with the given area. I have done math centers with second graders and loved them. I will continue to do them in fourth but was I was thinking with fourth graders we could work on a more in depth project.
If anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them.

[pinktxteacher]

I have used some of the projects on this site with my third graders.
http://www.mathcats.com/crafts.html
You may be able to get one or two ideas.

[mary.lu]

This site always has some great ideas:

http://mathwire.com/

[bokajosu]

I had my fifth grade class create a town for our geometry unit. They had to come up with a theme for the town and everything had to relate to that team (names of buildings, streets, etc.). They had a set of requirements for their map - so many parallel streets, perpendicular streets, intersecting streets, use 10 geometric shapes for the builings, have a park with a circular sandbox, triangular swingset, and a rectangular pool. All the dimensions were given. They used rulers, protractors, and a compass. There was a sheet with all the requirements and a score sheet to give a grade. They got very creative and really did a nice job with it. Sorry I can't give exact details. My papers are all in school. I did get it somewhere online. We worked on the project at the end of the classs periods if we finished up early.

[kristeacher]

Thanks again for the great sites and I love the geometric town. I will try to find this on line.

[bokajosu]

If I get into the school this week I will try to find it. It was the first year I did this and they had a great time with it.