6-1.3 Parks and Wall Art

This is an adaptation of a lesson from Math in Context's unit Reallotment. Students determine the area of triangles and quadrilaterals that are circumscribed by a rectangle and superimposed onto a grid. Students should be on the lookout for patterns and insights upon which they can develop shortcuts for finding areas of rectangles, triangles, and parallelograms. These shortcuts will then be encoded to arrive at formulas for area. A special caution to not rush this process by telling students the formula.

By Jeff Holcomb