[enlightenme2]

Hello,
I am teaching a lesson, for my observation, to my 3rd grade students about perimeter. Does anyone have any suggestions for an interesting motivation or warm up? Something really neat to catch their attention. Since I am being observed, and this is the low end math class, I thought a great "hook" would help the pretty boring lesson.
Thanks!

[Love3rdGrade]

You could do something hands-on like put shaving cream on the perimeter of their desk, have them walk the perimeter of the room, use a manipulative to go around the perimeter of something on their desk. I love M & M's and the kids gave me bags of them for Christmas. I let them use them for counting, etc in math. Good luck.

[Valerie]

I ask my students to bring in empty food containers that are boxes. I then cut them into flat pieces and then I cut those into polygons of various sizes and shapes. The students then measure the perimeter of their favorite foods---pizza, mac and cheese, cereal, little debbie cakes, etc.

[teachfla]

I teach it as a fence you need to build to keep your horse or dog in your yard. I draw the figures on the board and a fence. Then we figure out how much fence we need. I introduced it that way in August and still have some kids refer to perimeter as a fence!

[NCteacher]

We build a "principal pen"....we have a very laid back principal. He measures off a section of floor in the hallway near the office (conveniently covered in 12 inch square tiles!) and tells the kids that if they can "build" a pen that matches his given perimeter, they can put him in it. He tells us to build a principal pen that is 124 feet or something, then we get out the calculators and figure out what shape it will be and the length of each side- then we go to the hallway and mark it out with tape. Then I get a big ol' length of bulletin board paper and the kids line up around the "pen" and hold up the paper. They call the principal over and he acts all disgusted with them and gets right in! He stays there for a minute or two talking some trash with my kids...."I never thought you would do this to me!" kind of stuff. They ADORE it! With the 12 inch square tiles, it makes marking the perimeter out really easy- and it allows a class discussion on whether or not we should use rulers, yard sticks, measuring tapes, etc. to measure- usually one of the kids will say, "Hey! I know- let's use the floor tiles!" Hope this helps!

[Risa]

My students, in the past, have had trouble keeping perimeter and area correctly identified. My team partner came up with the following: As they say the word, PER-I-ME-TER, they are "drawing" a rectangle (or square) in the air. The word has four syllables and the rectangle (or square) has four sides, so they say a syllable as they "draw" a side. ANYTIME we say the word PERIMETER, we automatically draw the rectangle (or square) in the air to indicate that perimeter is the measure of the OUTSIDE of the shape.

After they got that, I taught them to remember AREA by waving their flattened hand in a small space as if they are filling in the interior of the whole space. They are taught that AREA is the measure of the INSIDE of a shape. Again, each time we say AREA, we wave a flat hand to 'fill in' a small space.

Not sure if this explanation is clear enough, but this was a great aid in helping my students to remember what each of the terms were, without confusing them.

[beachmom]

Well.......I walked around their desks and counted the perimeter and told them the word RIM was inside of this word perimeter. I then ha ha ha walked on top of their desks! We talked about the rim of other objects in the room. With area I handed out paper make believe "area rugs" they colored them and we voted on our favorite "Rug" to place around the rooms. They all have area rugs at home different sizes and colors, long ones and short ones, squares and rectangular. Anyway I told them that the area rug covers an area of the house. How much area does yours cover????Are some the same area but look different? We shared up front two that covered the same "area" but looked different. The paper rug had large squares on them to decorate and color. We also put tasles on the end with a hole puncher and small pieces of yarn this covered perimenter again. Hope this helps.