Teaching Children to Read Coordinates

When planning lessons for a year 4 class to introduce them to reading and plotting coordinates I found that although there were lots of brilliant worksheets to engage the children once the teaching was complete, there were only a few interactive resources for the actual teaching process.I created a PowerPoint containing a pirate looking for his treasure (I then copied the slides into the school IWB software). The children named the pirate and then physically moved him on the IWB to reach different locations on the map, counting how many steps across and how many steps up he had to go each time. We then discussed how to represent these movements as a coordinate, emphasising the two numbers should be written inside brackets and separated by a comma.

I found it was not necessarily the lower ability children who struggled with this topic and so had to readjust my groups accordingly. I worked with the children who struggled giving each of them a printed version of the map and a small pirate. Together we worked at moving the pirate to different coordinates. When the children moved onto independent work, I allowed them to continue to use their pirates. Physically moving the pirate on the worksheet allowed the children to think carefully about the steps involved and as a result their work improved.

I feel this initial introduction to coordinates benefited the children enormously as by the end of the week the majority of the class were plotting and reading coordinates in all 4 quadrants, something my school mentor had told me was above the ability of a year 4 class and was more appropriate to year 6. To me this reinforced the importance of having high standards of your pupils and believing in their ability. By setting them challenging work, the children were able to achieve a much higher standard of work.

Power Point slides shown below and available to download from Here