Coal City Intermediate School fifth graders practice coordinate graphing through creative exercises

Students in Mr. Leve’s fifth grade math class at Coal City Intermediate School recently focused on coordinate graphing as part of their curriculum. Coordinate graphing is a technique used to display relationships between numbers visually on a grid made up of two perpendicular axes, known as the X-axis (horizontal) and Y-axis (vertical). The intersection point of these axes is called the origin.

In this lesson, students learned to identify locations on the grid using ordered pairs, which are written in parentheses and consist of an x-coordinate and a y-coordinate separated by a comma. The method shares similarities with the board game Battleship, where players use coordinates to locate positions.

To apply their understanding, Mr. Leve’s students plotted and connected points on the grid to create images such as a dog, a scarecrow, and a back-to-school pencil.