Coordinate grids: plot points, mystery pictures and battleship

Battleship is how most of us learned coordinates, and it still works. B7, miss. C7, hit. A fifth grade pair with a printed grid and a pencil will play twenty minutes of ordered pairs and call it a free period.

What the sheet looks like

The coordinate grid generator prints five kinds of page. Plot the points lists lettered ordered pairs to mark. Write the coordinates shows plotted points and asks for their pairs. Mystery picture gives a list of points to plot and join in order until a house, sailboat, star, rocket, fish, cat face, pine tree, arrow, heart, kite or castle appears. What is at…? puts shapes on the grid and asks which one sits at a point. Battleship is a two-player sheet, classic (A–J across, 1–10 up) or a multiplication version where every shot is called by its fact and product.

The grid is first quadrant or four quadrants, 10, 15 or 20 squares, with 8, 10 or 12 points per page and an answer key.

Why it works

• Plotting and joining a mystery picture is self-checking. If the boat has a point in the sea, a pair was swapped, and the child finds it without a key.
• The four-quadrant option is where (−3, 2) and (2, −3) stop being the same point, which is the main thing middle school will assume they know.
• Multiplication battleship makes every shot a fact. To fire at a square you say its fact and product, and by the end of a game the child has said forty of them.

Who it suits

Grades 3 to 6. A third grader should start on the first quadrant, grid 10, with plot the points and the mystery pictures. Four quadrants on a 20 grid with write the coordinates is a sixth-grade page. For a child who has not met a grid with letters and numbers before, the map skills worksheet is the step before, since a map grid is a coordinate grid with gentler labels.

Both players print the same battleship sheet, which has a grid for their own ships and one for shots. Stand a folder up between them. The folder matters.