During the math workshops on Thursday and Friday our neighbourhood began using square tiles to find the area of a variety of regular and irregular shapes. We began by exploring areas by covering them with the 2 centimetre squared tiles. The children realised that they would have insufficient tiles to cover the areas, and then faced with the problem of how to measure the area without covering the whole space with tiles. Muna, Viarne, Lilli, Sascha and Payam were the first to realise that they could use their knowledge of arrays to find the area of a rectangle. This discussion began when Viarne asked the question, “Why do we need all the squares?’ The group shared their new found knowledge with the neighbourhood. A small group then found the area of the tables in the performance area. The group revealed to the class that it would take 2,542 tiles to cover the table. Harvey then quickly worked out that the area of the table is 5,084 centimetres squared.
Many strategies were discussed, then trialled and generalisations were beginning formulated.
Viarne, Payam, Lilli, Sascha and Muna's Array
Measuring the Area of the Performance Table
