Fifth Grade: Geometry

Model Perimeters and Areas at Home

Perimeter and area are two ways that help children quantify physical space.  Kids sometimes have difficulty grasping these geometry concepts, particularly when taught that a shape with a given area can have multiple perimeters. One way to help make this challenging concept accessible is to have children model areas and perimeters. Here’s an activity that will help bring these concepts to life. 

Materials needed:

• Paper/napkins/newspaper
• Small Ziploc bag of small square same size crackers or cereal, like Cheeze-Its
• Pen/pencil

Have your child place napkins, sheets on construction paper or newspaper on a table. Then give your child the bag of crackers.  Explain that each cracker is a square unit—side lengths of the same length. 

Work with your child to arrange three rows of three crackers into the shape of a square. Have them count the total number of squares to name the area. Then have them count the number of cracker sides that make up the sides of the square to name the perimeter.

Encourage your child to experiment using the crackers to model different shapes and sizes and provide the perimeter and area of each.

Try making this activity more challenging by asking your child to build two different shapes with the same perimeter or to build specific shapes, like:

• A perimeter of 14 units and an area of 10 square units
• A perimeter of 8 units and an area of 10 square units