Background Notes

People live in all different kinds of homes: houses, apartments, condominiums. They live in the city, the country and in the suburbs.

The bungalow is a one-story or one-and-a-half story design with a broad, low-gabled room with wide overhanging eaves typical of the Great Depression era.

Doing a floor plan of one's home is a way to practice math skills and drawing. Sharing these drawings in class will provide an opportunity for students get to know each others' lives and homes better.

Students can also practice measuring and drawing to scale by creating floor plans of their classroom or drawing their "dream house" floor plan.

Objectives

1. Students will measure and draw to scale.
2. Students will use math skills including finding perimeters and areas.
3. Students will think about their homes in ways that they might not have thought of before.
4. By sharing their floor plans in class, students will appreciate a variety of living styles.
5. Students will compare and contrast the different floor plans with a 1930s bungalow.

Michigan Social Studies Curriculum Content Standards

This lesson presents an opportunity to address, in part, these standards:

• 2.1.4. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: Locate and describe diverse kinds of communities and explain the reasons for their characteristics and locations.
• 5.1.2. INQUIRY: Acquire information from observation of the local environment.
• 5.1.3. INQUIRY: Organize information to make and interpret simple maps of their local surroundings and simple graphs and tables of social data drawn from their experiences.

Materials Needed

Measuring tape, ruler, pencil, paints, markers or crayons; paper, the two sample floor plans and pictures [PDF] of bungalow-style houses. They include the shape and measurements of each room.

Directions

• Ask students to take a measuring tape and measure each room in their home.
• Have them take a piece of paper and draw a floor plan of their home with each room in it.
• To make the drawing to scale, they need to use 1/4 inch to represent 1 foot (1 inch will represent 4 feet). If large paper is available and you want to simplify the exercise, use 1 inch to one foot.
• Students will need to include the measurements of each room and figure out the square feet for each room. Have them figure out the total square footage of the house by adding the square footage of all the rooms together.
• Have students draw a picture of the outside of their homes.
• Ask students to find out what kind of materials were used to build their home—the inside and the outside.

Questions for Discussion

1. Talk about your home. What kind of a home do you live in?
2. When was your home built?
3. How does your home compare to a 1930s bungalow?
4. Compare and contrast the different the kinds of homes in which classmates live. Name advantages of each.
5. What kind of home do you think you would like when you grow up?

At the Museum

• See the living room, bedroom and dining room of a bungalow home in the Great Depression Gallery.
• Compare the bungalow to the rooms in the "Growing Up in Michigan, 1880-1895" exhibit and to the living room and kitchen in the 1950s gallery. Discuss: What do these rooms and the objects in them tell you about how people lived during each time period?

Vocabulary

• Bungalow: A home of one-story or one-and-a-half story design with a broad, low-gabled roof with wide overhanging eaves; a front porch often extending the full width of the house; an open floor plan with relatively few room barriers; and made airy and bright through the use of interior lighting.

Updated 03/24/2004

Michigan Historical Center, Department of History, Arts and Libraries
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