Scale drawings and maps
Measure on a map and a room plan with a ruler, and use the scale to find the real sizes.
- UK: Year 7
- France: grade 5
- Germany: grade 3
- Syria: grade 7
- Palestine: grade 7
- Ukraine: grade 6
- Russia: grade 6
Guide
This studio follows the Key Stage 3 aims to "use scale factors, scale diagrams and maps" and to interpret scale drawings. The maps are made up: a road between two dots, with no real places or borders.
A scale of 1 : 50,000 means each 1 cm on the map is 50,000 cm on the ground. Both sides of a scale are in the same unit. To go from centimetres to kilometres we divide by 100,000 (100 cm = 1 m and 1000 m = 1 km).
In the ruler missions your child first slides the ruler so that its 0 is at the start of the road or wall, reads the length, then types the real size.
Common slips: thinking "1 cm = 50,000 km"; converting cm to km with 1000; writing the scale the wrong way round (50,000 : 1); and multiplying the area on the plan by the scale number.