SketchUp Lesson Plans

Here's a roundup of ideas for using SketchUp in the classroom, to finish up August, which has sort of been SketchUp month around here. My partner in tech ed, Shan Pesaru of Sharp Hue, Inc., is going to corral all of the SketchUp posts over at the SharpHue education page pretty soon here, so you can easily find them again. You can also click the "technology" tag on this page to see all the lessons with tech-focused activities.

While there are myriad ways to use SketchUp for educational purposes, my favorites break down into a few basic groups.

SketchUp as manipulative Make the abstract more concrete by using SketchUp to play with math concepts. It's easier than overhead Base 10 blocks, much as I love them. What's more, when students manipulate their creations, it's a kinesthetic experience for them -- with many more options than you would usually choose to keep on hand in your math tubs. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• SketchUp's protractor and measuring tape give excellent virtual measurement experiences. As with yesterday's lesson plan, these features allow you to use saved models (you can import them, too, if you want to work with more complex forms than your students can create right now). Extending the lessons in this way gives you more return on your investment of time and effort.
• When you make a surface with SketchUp, you can use the push-pull tool to pull the shape up into three dimensions. When you push it back down, it will reach the surface -- and keep going, into a negative three dimensions. What a great way to work on negative numbers!
• Turn on the "hidden geometry" (use the "view" menu) and transform simple shapes into more complex ones to see the relationships among the various shapes.
• By using the text tool (click "view" then "toolbars" then "large tool set" to get it on your workspace), you can label your geometric shapes. That opens up all kinds of possibilities: Cartesian coordinates, calculus... the world's your oyster here.

SketchUp for models Models of the real world are very helpful. For many students, that pretzel-and-gumdrop DNA molecule or cereal box covered wagon has real staying power, where an illustration or description doesn't. SketchUp allows you to provide modeling experiences more often, since it does away with the collection of materials, set up, and clean up of hands-on physical modeling. Again, you will think of many more ideas than these once you get started, but here are some that I like:

• Use the circle tool and the pencil to build two-dimensional insects, and the paint bucket to color them. Young students will fix the parts of the insect's body in their minds in this way. Molecules, cells, the earth's layers, and the stages of metamorphosis are more science concepts that lend themselves to modeling.
• The process of creating a three-dimensional model of a historical item such as an astrolabe or sundial leads students to greater understanding of the item, simply because they have to think about it more as they orbit around and work out all the sides. I like this for the history of technology, even for very young students. For example, when you model a cart, you'll quickly find that you can't lay the cart on the ground and put the wheels on the sides. You can also cut through your models to show the insides.
• Fantastic creatures, futuristic vehicles, and imaginary machines can be made in SketchUp with the shapes, curved and straight lines, and the freehand drawing tool (be sure to open the large tool set for maximum flexibility). The 3-D capability and the designer's ability to walk (or fly) into and around the design make SketchUp more satisfying for this kind of modeling than most drawing programs that you might have on your classroom computer.

SketchUp in combination with GoogleEarth I haven't talked much about GoogleEarth, but the compatibility of SketchUp and GoogleEarth open up lots of possibilities. In conversation with a fellow educator recently, I learned what she does with the application: "I look at it and say, 'Oooh!"" While I completely relate to this approach, there are more specific things you can do with GoogleEarth and SketchUp together:

• Trace the major trade routes at different time depths, using GoogleEarth. Build transport vehicles characteristic of the time with SketchUp, and set them along the routes.
• Use GoogleEarth as a starting point, and model erosion, weathering, and natural disasters with SketchUp. A whole new way to approach the New Madrid earthquake!
• Use GoogleEarth or one of the large variety of history or literature trips people have prepared and shared with it, and examine the kinds of buildings found in different times and places. Have students analyze the characteristics of the buildings, and then recreate similar buildings with SketchUp. This is still a modeling task, but the added elements of research and analysis are great preparation for later academic and professional work.

Recently, I've heard some concerns about how to ride herd on students using SketchUp in the classroom. I know what you mean, of course. It seems to me that the broad usefulness of SketchUp makes it worth the learning curve. It's really no harder to supervise students with SketchUp than to supervise them with PowerPoint or with online research; it's just that you're used to those programs. Just take it slowly and work your way up to more complex projects -- as you can see, you won't run out of ideas on how to use it, so it's worth the effort!

Sketchup Lesson Plans: Visual-Spatial Skills

We've been playing with Google SketchUp a lot, recently. If you've learned how to use SketchUp and shared it with your students, you'll want to use it more, so you can get the most out of your investment of time and effort in learning the application. Also, the kids will want to play with it all the time, so you might as well knock out some of the frameworks at the same time.

My first reaction to SketchUp for the classroom was "Virtual manipulatives!" but SketchUp was designed for architects, and making buildings is still one of the things it's best for. Most students will enjoy building houses, and the process lets you work on shapes, measurement, symmetry, and social studies as well as technology skills. In fact, some of my favorite SketchUp lesson plans involve housebuilding.

• Research the people who lived in your region in the past. In Arkansas, the Quapaw, Osage, and Caddo had the state divided up. Culminate your lesson on these peoples by having students build houses of the kind each group lived in and place them, using GoogleEarth, in the right region of the state.
• Design homes for literary characters. The houses of the Three Little Pigs would make a great SketchUp project, but older students can also make designs that particularly suit favorite characters in chapter books. Have students write an explanation of their thinking: what makes the design perfect for the character?
• Design houses that offer solutions for community or environmental challenges in the news. What kind of futuristic building might work best as a response to overcrowding, increasingly severe weather, or an aging population?

But once you've done the design, you don't have to stop there. Use the buildings for more lessons! Here's an example that can actually be used with any kind of building, but we're using a floor plan for our example.

If you tried last week's lesson plan for building a pioneer cabin, you know that there is a basic method for creating buildings in SketchUp. For this lesson, we're going to build interiors, so here are the steps:

• Use the rectangle tool to build the foundation.
• Build walls. You can use the rectangle tool again, or use the offset tool and then the push-pull tool to pull your walls up or push your floor down.
• Add the roof -- but this time we're making interiors, so you can just add ceilings, or leave them open.
• Use the paint bucket tool to make the surfaces translucent so you can see through them.

Shan Pesaru of Sharp Hue, Inc. built the model on this page. Having students create more complex interiors like these as a followup to the cabin plan gives them opportunities to fine-tune their SketchUp skills, improve hand-eye coordination, and work with real-world math applications. However, if your students are younger or otherwise not ready for this level of complexity, you can still use this lesson plan. Just have them make a two-room house, using the same process they used with the cabin.

If you have a computer lab, ask that students be allowed to work on their designs freely till they're ready to unveil them. If you have a single-computer classroom, rotate students and let them work on their designs during their computer time. Either way, students will need the chance to save their work

Note that the two images here are the same model, seen from different angles.

Recognizing this can be a challenge. Once you've got some interiors created, extend the value of the lesson by using them in a lesson for this skill.

Have students print out their model. Now use the orbit tool to find another perspective and print that out as well. Have them cut their prints down and mount them on cardstock. Ask students to write their names on the back of the pictures. Gather them all up and number them on the front. At this point, I'd laminate them for future use.

Create a bulletin board display with one view of the buildings on the left of the board and the others randomly arranged on the right. Use Mavalus Tape or pushpins to stretch lengths of string from one view of a building on the left to another building on the right (pushpins work best, if they are not a safety concern). Viewers are challenged to match the separate views.  If later visitors to the board disagree, they can change the destination of the pushpin. When changes are no longer being made, you can check the answers as a class and see how well you were able to match the views.

When you're finished, gather the pictures and put them together in a large envelope for a sorting center. Be sure to make a key showing which numbers go together so later users of the center can check their answers.

You can extend the lesson by specifying that one view is from the north of the building, and asking students to determine where the viewer is standing for the other view: east of the building? southwest?

Note that this is a task which is easier for some students than others. Doing some work on it as a class, and then setting up the center for those who found it challenging, can be a great opportunity for diversified instruction.

Writing Lesson Plans: Integrating Math and Writing

Doritoritta  asked about integrating math and writing.

Integrating writing into math lessons, and vice versa, can be challenging. After all, the main point of equations is to avoid having to put complex things into words.

On the other hand, for many people, one of the great things about words is that they allow you to avoid equations. So you can adapt many good writing activities for math classes. Let me share a few of my tried and true writing exercises with you, with suggestions for bringing math in -- or bringing them into math classes.

One of my favorite exercises for getting students to think about the importance of clarity in academic writing is this one:

Back to Back Descriptions

Have students find a partner and sit back to back with their partner, each student having a paper and something to write with. Students take turns being the speaker and the listener. The speaker draws something and describes it, while the listener reproduces it based on the speaker's description. The students compare their drawings when they finish, to see how similar their drawings are, and then switch places.

This makes it clear that it takes some effort to be clear and complete when writing (communicating without interaction), and also show students how helpful feedback is, since the second try is always far more successful than the first one.

In a general writing course, the drawing can be the students' bedrooms or a fantasy robot design or anything at all. For a math connection, specify that the description must consist of geometric shapes, hand out rulers and aim for complete precision, or have the speaker start with a graph or other graphic representation of math data -- whatever fits with the math you're currently working on.

Note that this assignment doesn't involve writing. Sometimes it's easier to grasp lessons when they're broken down, and in this case we're separating the point about how clear you have to be to communicate well, and the point about how feedback helps, from the process of writing.

I like this exercise for working with tenses, genres, and also with math:

Rewriting Recipes

Recipes are written in a particular way. There is a list, liberally studded with numbers, or tools and ingredients and possibly also temperatures. Then there is a section written entirely in the imperative. But you can rewrite a recipe as a narrative, describing how a character made something. I like to use Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes, and you can find a sample here, but you can do this with any recipe.

Tell students they can't use numerals at all, though they can write out numbers if they have to. How much more you elaborate the rules on this depends on your class, but you can end up with things like this:

"Betty divided an onion evenly in half, and then in half again, and packed away three of the four pieces. She took up the knife again and chopped the remaining part into ever smaller pieces, enjoying the thwack of the knife on the wooden board..."

Or of course it might be, "I cut the onion into four pieces. I took one of the pieces. I cut it into a lot of small pieces."

With young students, it can be good to do this activity in groups, dividing one recipe into sections.

Getting Real

Bring a pineapple into the classroom, or a sunflower, or a pine cone -- or all three. Look for spirals in these nice plants. Then  count. You're going to end up with numbers like 8, 13, 21, 34... numbers in the Fibonacci sequence.

How far you go with studying the sequence depends on your students' grade level. Here are some resources if you want to get deeper into the math of it:

Have students write, once they understand the phenomenon, about how it made them feel to learn this amazing thing.

Of course, it doesn't have to be the Fibonacci sequence. Check my math tags (click where it says "math" in the word cloud) for lessons on the Birthday Paradox, Golden Section, and other favorite cool math stuff,or bring in the thing you find most exciting.

Defining Moments

Writing a useful definition of something is harder than your students might expect, and requires a good understanding of the term. Have students write good definitions of math terms in a class wiki, or on sentence strips which then become part of your classroom word wall. This can be a satisfying project with long-term usefulness.

Writing Lesson Plans: Getting Started

Things have changed so much in teaching, and they change so frequently, that it might be reassuring to reflect that the teaching of writing has changed almost not at all since Ancient Greece.

There have been some changes, essentially in three areas:

• Technology, from an increasing emphasis on written instead of oral language (Ancient Greece, remember?) to the inclusion of keyboarding and writing for the web.
• The pendulum swing from freewriting to boilerplate and back. This has been going on for centuries, as I learned from Thomas Cahill's entertaining book How the Irish Saved Civilization, and is still going on today.
• The means of presenting the writing process and organizing the students' practice.

But overall, effective writing lessons still involve three things:

• Examining excellent models. It can be good to work with student writing, too, but writers improve their writing by reading good writing. Sounds like a tongue-twister, but it's true. Keep stacks of good literature on hand to use as examples of points you're teaching. For example, instead of telling students not to use "said" as the only verb in their dialogue and posting a list of alternatives, grab Michael Hoeye's Time Stops for No Mouse and read a page aloud. Have students write down all the alternatives to "said" that they hear -- there are plenty.
• Practice. There is no way to improve writing without doing lots of writing. Many teachers have increased their writing assignments to the point where students groan at the idea of doing something interesting because they know that they'll have to write about it later. One thing that helps with this is an attempt to have a purpose for writing as often as possible. Write stories to read to the kindergartners. Write letters telling grandparents about the interesting thing you did in class. Write entries at Wikipedia. Just make some communicative point to the writing as often as possible.
• Feedback. Once students have written something, they need feedback on it, so they can improve it through rewriting and building on it for next time. Peer review, notes, and group edits are all good ways to do this. Make a class rule to say what you like about a paper as well as ways it can be improved, agree that all writing can be improved, and lavish praise on the improved product to help students learn to accept this feedback. 

If your writing lessons have these three elements, your students will improve.

Pass That Test, Don't Eat It!

Testing is a central fact of current school life. At A Plus Educational Supply, a rising kindergartner came in to visit this summer. He was excited about going to school, and the workers there were happy to share in his excitement.

"Be a good student!" they encouraged him.
"I will," said the boy confidently. "I'll bring you my scores!"

It was just another indication of how test-focused our schools have become. Four year olds think of test scores along with school buses and learning to read.

How can you present testing to young students in a positive way? It isn't always easy. A new picture book by Michael Ward can help.

Pass That Test, Don't Eat It is the story of "wise, well-educated goats" who decide that since every kid is important, they need a plan to make sure that every kid does well in school.Their plan is to give a test to each kid. "The results of this test will help teachers know who is learning and who is not," say the clipboard-wielding goats in their meeting. "Right away, teachers began preparing students to do their very best in school and on the test."

Now, you may be having a bit of trouble swallowing this. We are not all feeling that positive about the emphasis on testing in our schools nowadays. Nonetheless, our students are going to have to spend a large proportion of their class time preparing for and taking tests, and this book can help us give the kids a sense of purpose in the process, regardless of our own feelings about it.

Ward's background in the testing industry has allowed him to do this positive presentation sincerely and well. He even provides a chant (the goats use it for jumping rope, which is an excellent idea): "Do your best. Pass that test."
The book goes on to review the importance of getting a good night's sleep, eating breakfast ("so you will not want to eat your test later"), and so on. Test-taking strategies are presented in the course of the story. Then -- and I really like this part -- the process of gathering, scoring, and reporting on the tests is shown. Kids are encouraged to "share your score report with those who love and care about you."

April McLean's soft pictures show goats doing chemistry experiments, using carrots for manipulatives, and suddenly realizing how important it is to focus on the test (the expressions for that page are marvelous), as well as working on their tests and playing afterwards with a sense of a job well done.

It's pretty much the perfect way to introduce the idea of testing to your K-2 students.

The books are available at Pages of Parenting, either in the physical bookstore in Fayetteville, Arkansas, or at their online store.

Visit Barber Valley Books to read an excerpt of the book and download Ward's free teacher guide with printable PDF files of reproducibles on predicting, making a mental image, and drawing inferences.

Ward plans more books in the series. In the meantime, a couple of other picture books on the subject that I like:

• Testing Miss Malarky, by Judy Finchler
• Score One for the Sloths, by Helen Lester