Multi-Discipline Project for Spring

Spring is in the air and my daughter is ready to get outside. So yesterday I gave her a 50 foot tape measure, a large sheet of posterboard, and told her to make a scale drawing of our property. First she is starting with the hardscape (walls, sidewalks, driveway, deck, patio, property lines, fences).

I like this project a lot because it teaches a number of necessary skills:

• Organization -- She has to take a lot of measurements and keep track of them.
• Precision -- She needs to get every measurement correct or it will throw her whole project off.
• Planning -- Planning out what measurements to take and in what order is a good challenge.
• Neatness -- Small errors will propagate within the project if she isn't very neat with her lines.
• Spatial Cognition -- She is learning how to judge distances, proportions, and how things fit together.
• Drawing skills -- She'll need to work on drawing neat, precise lines, curves.

Eventually, she'll get to the softscape -- plants, trees, and flower beds, which will give her a basis for looking up some of the plants. This is a good exercise for science. She also will be calculating areas in the future (How many square feet of lawn do we have?)