Area of a dream place 

This activity invites students to consider what area is and where we use it in the real world. Students engage in a number of activities using their creativity and building their knowledge of how to calculate area, including the area of large or unusual spaces, and their awareness of how the area is relevant to the school environment and their own life. The activity culminates with students creating a map of a “dream place” of their choice and calculating the area of each section. 

• Recognize area as an attribute of plane figures and understand concepts of measurement and how to calculate and estimate area

• Relate area to the operations of multiplication and addition and recognize the area as additive

This unit has a creativity focus:

• Generate unusual ideas for imagined dream places

• Envision how to solve maths problems in personally novel ways

• Make new connections and reflect on steps taken

Resources

Web and print

• Videos about the distributive property could be used to support teaching. For example, https://www.khanacademy.org/math/cc-third-grade-math/3rd-geometry/cc-third-grade-area-distributive-property/v/area-of-rectangles-and-the-distributive-property

• Two useful books are Murphy, J., (2012) Bigger, Better, Best (Area) Holiday House and Adler, David A. (2012) Perimeter, area, and Volume: A Monster Book of Dimensions Holiday House

Other Resources

• Graph Paper, pencil, crayons, markers, colour pencils, rulers, measuring tape/rulers

• A driving question board set up somewhere in the classroom

• Post it notes or paper and pins to post ideas to the driving question board

Opportunities to adapt, extend, and enrich

• This activity could be extended into literacy and language, music, drama, or visual arts by asking students to write stories/music/plays or create art about the area or using their knowledge of the area (e.g. imagine a world where we didn’t know how to work out the area of a place and write a story that shows some of the problems we would have) or about a particular event when it was important to be able to calculate the area (e.g. an argument over who has the biggest bedroom)

English Version

•  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DQeATuSxbd3ByQ9dhwrkzTW9qGPHOfrtuPpFtFyuCXE/edit?usp=sharing

Hindi Version

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-HgQ-Bvq3FoRsyqKwlj-mVgkkslSNnezahBuD085gS0/edit?usp=sharing

Gujarati Version

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/11GIwkiGRBamn2zXkWNqnXFkU27KU3d-98bOnP3gkJvE/edit?usp=sharing

Kannada Version

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T8D7UmIP8RdmCG-YQ7E6r5pPDvi2_RmOBOi4wR7loec/edit?usp=drive_link