Rich tasks for this chapter - page 211
- These are problem solving open-ended questions that require students to investigate perimeter, area and volume. The tasks can be given at the start of a topic and done as the students gain enough knowledge to complete them, inserted into a topic at an appropriate place, or given as homework, or extension.
- It’s gala time again
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1. It’s gala time again
- This task could be extended or simplified by having more or fewer activities at the gala.
- Students could work in groups and then groups could compare their designs.
- This task could be adapted to suit your school by getting students to measure out a suitable area in your school grounds for the gala and then designing a gala within that area. If your school has had galas or fairs in the past, students could research what was done before and create a new design for the stalls and activities.
- Students could also do this activity digitally, either on a document with a grid background or using the “grid” view in Word or similar.
Perimeter and area - pages 212, 214 and 216
- Find the perimeter of shapes.
- Find a missing length on a shape, given the perimeter.
- Explore the area of rectangles and use multiplication to find the area of them.
- Find the area of irregular shapes with a combination of multiplication and counting squares.
- Draw shapes with a given perimeter or area or both.
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Teacher notes
- Some students get confused between area and perimeter. You could encourage them to make a poster, or create a song or a mnemonic to help them remember.
- It is important for students to understand that perimeter is a length and so has units of length such as mm, cm, m, km.
- It is equally important that students understand the concept of area and that it is two-dimensional. Squares such as 1 cm by 1 cm (1 cm2) or 1 m by 1 m (1 m2) are used to describe area. The number of squares that cover the shape is a measure of the area.
- Encourage students to understand why the units of area have a little 2 and what this means, for example cm2 means cm x cm because two equal lengths are multiplied together.
- Emphasise the importance of and reasons for having standard units for area.
- It is important with any measuring task to stress the importance of measuring accurately.
Volume - page 220
- Understand that volume is the amount of space an object takes up and explore ways of finding and recording volumes.
- Begin to understand that the volume of a cuboid is found by multiplying the lengths of the sides together.
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Teacher notes
- Students need to make the link between taking up space and volume, and that cubes with sides of 1 mm, 1 cm or 1 m length are the usual standard units used to describe the volume of an object.
- You could get students to measure the outside of boxes and tell you how many 1 cm3 cubes will fit on the first layer: length x width gives you one 2-D shape (a rectangle). Then when they multiply by the number of layers (height or thickness) the shape becomes 3-D (a cuboid).
- The relationship between 1-D (length or perimeter), 2-D (area and squared units), and 3-D (volume and cubic units) helps students to understand why the formulas work when these are formalised in level 4.
- Encourage students to understand why the units of volume have a little 3 and what this means. For example, cm3 means cm x cm x cm because three lengths are multiplied together.
- You could set up the practicals 1-4 on page 220 as stations around the room. Some of the activities will probably take a whole session.
- In the practical That’s a lot on page 221 you could ask students to work out how many 1 cm3 cubes could fit inside the 1 m3.
