Perimeter Rhythms Part I

In this lesson students play a musical matching game where they match a shape to its rhythm (expressed in number bars), and then build their own shapes with the custom polygon tool to replicate a rhythm they've just heard and seen (in animated number bars). Students learn to think about the perimeter of a shape as a short musical rhythm; specifically, that each segment of a shape can represent a certain amount of time. They can use the fact that the sound of the perimeter is proportional to the perimeter of the shape to reason about how the perimeter of any shape is composed. This should act as a helpful precursor to calculating perimeter and thinking about area.

By Gabriel Turow