March 10, 2020 | Melissa McCallihan
Fifth grade math students have been thinking about what happens to the area and perimeter of a shape as you grow the shape. Using tiles, students added rows to columns to change the size of the shape. Then they wondered what would happen if the shape had a 100 rows. From manipulating the shape, they discovered an equation that would work for any number of rows.
Then students began their work on coordinate graphing. Students gained math vocabulary including ordered pairs, x-axis and y-axis. Students created graphs from charts they generated based on a number of factors given to them. Students made connections from their study of coordinate graphing to the game Battleship. A culminating project is for students to create an improved version of battleship for their peers to play.
Students play paper Battleship to research how to make it bigger and better!