Area and Perimeter Christmas!

I got this really great activity from a blog (Teaching in Room 6) I found on Pinterest. I was trying to come up with a fun "Christmasy" themed activity to practice area and perimeter and couldn't think of anything! So when I can't come up with my own thing...I turn to Pinterest! I know that I can always find great ideas from fellow teachers on there!

The students measure the length and width of the branches on the tree in centimeters and they then find the area and perimeter. I also had my students find the area and perimeter of any rectangle or square on their paper so that included the trunk of the tree and the gifts under the tree. Here is the link to the blog I got this idea from, from her blog you can get the recording sheet I used...and its FREE!

So to make my life easier I got four baskets and put all the paper supplies the kids might need in them. I went ahead and pre cut long green rectangles and small square pieces of paper of brown, yellow, pink, red and blue. I just put a bunch in each basket so the students could just get paper from there instead of getting up to get whole big pieces and risk waisting a lot of construction paper. The students then cut the strips of paper to the sizes they wanted for their trees!

I have a captain at each group and the capitals were in charge of the baskets and giving out the materials to the students at their group. This helped so I did't have 6 sets of kids hands in the basket at one time fighting over paper. If they needed more materials they just asked their captain and they handed them what they needed.

On the recording sheet I made the students write out the formula every single time they worked out their problem for area and perimeter. I think this was helpful so they could try to commit them to memory. Most already know it because they learned it in 3rd grade. In 4th grade we teach them to find the missing side when given the area or perimeter. This activity did not cover that skill...but I thought it was still ok since we just started this lesson on Monday and it is a week before Christmas break!

Hope this gives some ideas to fellow teachers! I played Christmas music and the students worked hard creating some adorable trees and the students did great on their math work!

Merry Christmas!!