Day 62: Perimeter Intro

6th Grade Math Standards: Find the area of right triangles, other triangles, special quadrilaterals, and polygons by composing into rectangles or decomposing into triangles and other shapes; apply these techniques in the context of solving real-world and mathematical problems.

MP1 Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them

The Learning Objective: Find the perimeter of a figure

Quote of the Day: “By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better.” - John Wooden

Agenda:

1. Jumpstart 
2. Quiz Review
3. Perimeter Practice
4. Staircase Practice

The Assessment: Circumventing the room as students worked in partners on their perimeter practice worksheet. Also circumventing the room as students tried to come up with the third and fourth staircases in the pattern, the rule for the perimeter, and summarizing the patterns that they found in three sentences. I collected their summaries.

Homework: Work on Weekly Quiz #9

My Glass Half-Full Take: I really enjoyed the staircase activity. The entire class was engaged and one student caught a pattern that I did not care to investigate (the perimeter of the stair part always matched the pattern number). I also liked teaching perimeter even though it's in the fourth grade standards. I thought this lesson added value in terms of talking about units. Students need to know why we write area in units squared and volume in units cubed. Understanding why we write perimeter in just plain units is a step in the direction of doing just that. I also got to ask valuable questions such as what does one tickle mark mean (the answer was feet but students would say an exponent and A prime - which were both appropriate answers in other scenarios). Another question we got value from is what to do when the numbers don't have units next to them.

One Thing to Do Differently: I wish I had targetted certain problems for students to do on the perimeter practice. They had the opportunity to work on adding fractions on a couple problems and also had several problems with multiple steps. The last question was a theory type of question in which students were asked to uncover what ways a rectangle could have a perimeter of 24.