Investigating Area

It's great to be back after the Holiday Break, and in Room 15 we started back in math investigating area.

What is area? Here is a definition from the website Math is Fun.

To begin our investigation we read the book Grandfather Tang's Story. This is a story that introduces the idea of tangrams, which are seven different shapes (triangles, parallelograms, squares) that are used to create other shapes. 

 We experimented with these shapes to create different pictures. Even though the pictures were different, they all covered the same amount of space!

 

 

Next, we switched from tangrams to using tiles to find the area of figures. We discussed why it might better to use something like tiles to find the area instead of tangrams. We looked at three different figures that were close to the same size. We estimated which figure might have the greatest area, and then we used tiles to fill in the space inside to see if our estimations were correct.

 

 

Our next investigation into area was working with rectangles. If we have a rectangle with an area of 12 tiles, what would it look like? We worked together and discovered that there are lots of different rectangles we can make that have the same area. We used Skitch and ShowMe to share what we discovered.

We are off to a great start learning about area!

Math is all around us and we use area in our day-to-day lives often. We would love to hear some examples of how you might have used area in the past. Please share in comments below!