My son has struggled with area and perimeter so we decided to make it hands on. I gave Raisin a challenge this morning: find the area and perimeter of his bedroom. Further, I asked him to build a bedroom model to go along with his answer.
Then, I gave him a measuring tape and graphing paper and told him he could use LEGO bricks if he wanted. He was delighted to get to work in making a bedroom model, and was especially excited once I mentioned LEGO bricks!
First he measured all of the walls in his room. He measured twice to make sure he had it right. Then he marked his graph paper. We decided that each square would be half of a foot.
He decided, on his own, to add the furniture in to his room. He color coded each item of furniture on his graph paper map.
Then he got to work in making a LEGO model. He started with the walls.
Then he covered bits of our building block room’s floor with the furniture he had measured.
At this point, Raisin decided we needed to make the furniture three dimensional! Afterall, he and his sister share a bunk bed. A bunk bed would be much more fun for mini-figs to play on!
Back upstairs to measure he went! He added a bunk bed, dresser, two bookshelves (very tall!), and even Strawberry’s doll crib.
Strawberry was so excited to come home from preschool to play along with him. They played with LEGOs pretty much all afternoon.
We even made a stop motion video for you to enjoy. Here it is!
He may have though this was all for fun, but this was actually a learning tool. Here are the questions he had to answer after the fact.
- What is the perimeter of your bedroom walls?
- What is the area of your bedroom carpet?
- What is the inside volume of your dresser? (pretend like the drawers do not take up space)
- What is the total volume of the two bookshelves in your room? (pretend like the shelves do not take up space)
I love how the visualizing with the blocks made it possible for Raisin to better grasp the concepts of area, perimeter, and volume. I’ll bet he’ll ask for another STEM challenge next week!