The kids have looked at co-ordinates before and as we are working on Geometry at the moment it seemed like a good time to go back and revisit it.  But we have also been slowing down the learning activities this week while my daughter catches her breath a bit so I thought it might be good to link the co-ordinates with a drawing activity. (In our house any learning activity with a slightly arty angle seems to be popular.)

We had completed a few of the grid copy pages from Activity Village before and I remember thinking at the time that it reminded me of co-ordinates so I went back and had a look.  I started off by printing out the butterfly grid copy page and then “added in an x and y-axis”.  I purposely labelled the one axis with letters and the one with numbers so as it avoid confusing my youngest.

My youngest actually told me that labelling the picture helped him and stopped him getting so muddled up when he was trying to figure out where he needed to work.

And I noticed the more pictures he did the more comfortable he became with telling me exactly where he was working – the co-ordinates just started rolling off his tongue without a second thought.

He did amend my idea though – he wanted the letters at the top and bottom of his page so he could quickly see where he was.

My daughter actually struggled a bit with this.  But what helped her was if she first plotted a few intersecting points on her page and then tried to draw the lines.

This definitely seemed to help.

I really like these grid copy pages and I think the more the kids practice the easier the get.

All of the grid copy pages that we used are from Activity Village (you need a membership for their site which is currently around £15 for 12 months).

The Grid Copy Section is here – Activity Village Grid copy pages

And the individual ones that we used in the photographs are these ones – butterfly, sunflower, tropical island, snowdrops.

This is a totally independent post. It is just a learning activity that we have been doing lately and I thought someone else might like the idea.