Perimeter and Area Robots

I started the activity by pretending that our class had received a ‘Top Secret Mission’ from Rocket Lab. It was perfect because we had Shane Fleming from Rocket Lab come to school in the morning to talk about how Rockets work. I secretly handed him my envelope with the Room 3 maths mission in it. He presented it to Room 3 who were enthusiastic and couldn’t wait to see what was the mission was install for them.

I made a big deal out of opening the envelope. I acted very secretive, because of course, it’s a top-secret mission, and everyone always gets so involved in the project. Rocket Lab had asked students to create a robot using 1cm squared paper, in which the children would be able to calculate the area and perimeter of each body part. Each body part of the robot had to be a 4 sided shape that didn’t cut squares in half (therefore full square/rectangle shapes were needed).

Their robot needed to have:

• A head
• Two arms
• A body
• Two legs

I can definitely say that the tamariki did a splendid job counting the number of squares for each body part, the older kids saw them as arrays and used multiplication. The perimeter was a bit trickier counting the squares around each body part but they enjoyed this fun activity and were learning about perimeter and area at the same time. Tau kē, ngā tamariki o Ruma toru!!