“Information’s pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.” -Clarence Day, The Crow’s Nest

Last week I received a comment and a request from Anne, an academic coach at an Elementary school in Georgia. I first heard from Anne this August when she visited my website looking for information about differentiating instruction and using small groups in math.  Her school has been using the free resources about Tabor Rotation that I’ve been providing on my website and Blog and they have been implementing Tabor Rotation in their school.

I was intrigued by Anne’s request to post activities and games for exploring and understanding the concepts of area and perimeter of irregular polygons. I knew that many other teachers would also benefit from the information in today’s Games Blog.

First of all, remember to make the connections of any concept to the students’ world. It’s one of the most basic comprehension strategies used in literacy, but is rarely emphasized in mathematics. If the students don’t make a real-world connection to what they are learning and why they should be learning it, then the instruction sounds like the “wha, wha, wha” of Charlie Brown’s parents.

This video, about calculating how much paint is needed to cover a wall that has a window, would be an excellent springboard for small-group discussion. [http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=20966]

Integrating the subjects you teach (math & science for instance) would be another opportunity to apply the concepts of area and perimeter in a real-world setting.  One performance task I created years ago asks the “scientists” in the classroom “lab” to work with a team and design the first space station on the moon.

FunBrain.com has an excellent online game for exploring area and perimeter of regular polygons.   The polygon generator shows a rectangle with the dimensions labeled. The student must calculate the area or perimeter of the rectangle.  For each problem the student answers correctly, she will receive a piece of an archeological puzzle.  The game ends when the learner gets all the puzzle pieces.[http://www.funbrain.com/poly/index.html]

There are some comprehensive units, with multiple lessons and resources, on several other websites. The Utah Education Network provides lesson plans for the use of manipulatives to help students create various geometric shapes and measure their area. [http://www.uen.org/Lessonplan/preview.cgi?LPid=21544]

The UEN page includes 14 PDF files, games, background for teachers, instructional procedures, extension, and assessments. Everything would be of value in helping students understand, concretely and representationally, the area of a polygon.  This is good stuff!

NCTM also has a good unit of lessons on the topic of using the area formula for a rectangle to discover the area formulas for triangles, parallelograms, and trapezoids. Several of the lesson focus on helping students consider irregular figures whose areas can be determined by estimation or decomposition.

[http://illuminations.nctm.org/LessonDetail.aspx?ID=U160]

All of these online games would be perfect in the Tabor Rotation Games Station and/or the Technology/Application Station. After a teacher-directed exploration and review in the Whole-Group Mini-Lesson, students would find The Shape Explorer incredibly engaging. The Shape Explorer generates shapes, allows students to respond with area and perimeter, checks the answers, and then generates a new shape.

[http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/ShapeExplorer/]

BUT WAIT… there’s MORE!

Do you want your students to truly understand what you have taught so they can apply it in other situations and not have to re-learn it in future years? Why not try the real-world task below.

PIZZA PRODUCTION

• Have students research information about factories. This is an interesting social studies topic (especially when the students read about child labor in the early 1900’s).
• Have students brainstorm ingredients they like on a real pizza and what is needed to make a paper replica of a pizza.
• Ask each pair of students to create a topping (polygon) or part of the pizza that will be used in the production line process.
• In order to make their ingredients, the students will have to determine how big one ingredient is (surface area), how many ingredients will go on one pizza (multi-step problem solving), how many pizzas they think the class can make (estimation), and how much paper will be needed to make the total number of ingredients they will supply (surface area).

Post a picture of your class “pizza factory” and the engagement of students in a reason why they need to know the area of irregular polygons! Let me know what happened when you helped your students make a connection to something that seems irregular and impossible, but winds up being pretty important!

I hope that I’ve given you plenty of resources to use in your implementation of Tabor Rotation.  This truly is the easiest way to provide real differentiated instruction to your students and meet the needs of all learners in your classroom.   STAY TUNED!  I have a bunch more good stuff coming!

“In the end we retain from our studies only that which we practically apply.” -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Look at what’s possible with students all the time…

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/21851805[/vimeo]