Medieval Measure

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Purpose

This is a level 2 measurement strand activity from the Figure It Out series.
A PDF of the student activity is included.

Achievement Objectives
GM2-1: Create and use appropriate units and devices to measure length, area, volume and capacity, weight (mass), turn (angle), temperature, and time.
Student Activity

Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close. Download PDF (251 KB)

Specific Learning Outcomes

find the area of a shape

Required Resource Materials

FIO, Level 2-3, Measurement, Medieval Measure, page 2

Place value blocks

Activity

Measuring an area has strong connections to tessellation in Geometry and multiplication in Number. For example, when using multilink cubes to find the area of a rectangle, students are creating a tessellation of squares

cubes.

Students may use “one-by-one” counting to find the total number of cubes, but encourage them to use addition and multiplication as increasingly efficient strategies.
In this activity, it is important for students to describe the strategies they used by recording the number sentences. For the rectangle given above, the sentence might be:
5 + 5 + 5 = 15 or 3 x 5 = 15
3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 15 or 5 x 3 = 15
This idea can be extended by using other arrays and masking parts of the arrays to encourage visualisation. For example:

array.
How many apples are in the whole array?
When students use place value blocks as their unit of area, they should find that their answer is four times the answer they would get with multilink cubes. Their answers from the place value blocks could be written as cm2, as in 15 cm2 or 15 square centimetres.

blocks.
This is a simple way of demonstrating enlargement in geometry. If the sides of a shape are enlarged by a factor of two (that is, the lengths are doubled), then its area will quadruple. For example:

enlarge.
Answers to Activity

1. 124 bricks
2. Answers will vary. Students may measure each defined area (for example, 2 x 2) or measure the front in two pieces and subtract the empty spaces.
3. Answers will vary.

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Level Two