The concept of area like the concept of perimeter is used constantly in everyday life so students will already have an intuitive understanding of it. We need to use and link that understanding to the math activities in the classroom. Hands on activities and word problems that connect to real-life and come from the students’ experiences are a great way to do that. Visuals and manipulatives, discussions, and explorations with real objects are the first step to teaching area.
Below are some ideas for activities to teach and have fun with the concept of area. Check out our post and resources for perimeter here
- Draw a robot, a person, or any other shape on graph paper and measure its area in unit squares. You can use lego bricks on a lego board and measure the area in lego studs. You can give a specific number of squares that their creation should cover to challenge your students.
- Write/Draw your initial as a block letter on graph paper and measure its area.
- Use painter’s tape to make shapes on the floor. Let the students guess the area, and then measure the area using the tiles on the floor or a measuring tape.
- Use pentominoes and other tiles or lego to create rectangles and find their area.
- Use geoboards to create shapes with a given area. Toy theater has a good digital one. https://toytheater.com/
- Measure the area of outside areas using a measuring tape, a piece of string (one meter), a stick and more. For example, you can measure the area of the basketball court, the playground, the classroom floor and any other rectangular and square areas. You don’t need to use measuring tapes right away, you can start with different measuring units and create squares out of them. You can measure the area of different rooms in the school and compare them.
- Use foam squares/tiles to create shapes on the floor. See how many different shapes with area 20 squares you ca make. The students can make rectangles, squares, rectilinear shapes. Challenge: Try to get the shape with the least or greatest perimeter using a specific number of tiles.
- Use square crackers on a board to do the same as above.
- Read books about area like:
Perimeter, Area, and Volume by David Adler,
Mighty Math: Cosmic Geometry by Edmark,
Spaghetti and Meatballs for All! A Mathematical Story by Marilyn Burns
We have created some print and digital activity cards to practice the concept or area. The activities include:
- Building and comparing shapes
- Finding the area of different shapes.
- Area of rectangles
- Area of right triangles
- Area of rectilinear shapes
- Pentomino puzzles
- Word problems
- Challenge puzzles
- and more…
Here is a small sample below
The premium version includes 70 digital activities and 69 print activities.
Find the premium version and a free version below.
Find ideas and activities for perimeter here
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