Thursday, May 3, 2012

Visualizing Areas

I recently created these for my 7th-graders to do/try individually on quizzlets. The task is to find the area for each of these shapes. I thought I'd share them here, since sometimes it's hard to find problems with the right level of difficulty in textbooks and stuff. After some hands-on play with geometry ideas and formulas, I was mostly interested in the kids being able to categorize/visualize objects and their relationship to one another.

(Even though they're familiar with trapezoids -- which, by the way, the Europeans call trapeeeeezia, or trapeeeeezium in singular form -- by now, this one below tripped many of them up because the diagonal lines don't "look" parallel. We had to discuss afterwards about what happens when you are walking along a street, make a 90-degree right turn, and then another 90-degree right turn. Are you walking parallel to the original street?)

I was pleased that they did very well on the two below, since these shapes are a bit less standard. On the quizzlet, they had to both find the area and explain the process. Go 7th-graders!


1 comment:

  1. Interesting shapes!

    I think we have to keep presenting challenging questions to our math students, to show them that the rules they learn with basic examples can be used in much more complex situations, including those in everyday life.

    Thanks for sharing, Mimi

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