I went for my second visit on Friday and it was so much fun! The students at Edgemont have been learning all about perimeter this week and will be learning all about area next week! That means that we needed to come up with a way to teach these two subjects while integrating the arts! Luckily, this isn't hard at all because perimeter and area naturally lend themselves to drawings. In math, we usually are given boring shapes like squares and rectangles to find the area and perimeter of, but you can really use any shape you want! We decided to use art to spice this process up and so when I first got to class, we gave all the children graph paper and let them draw their favorite animal on it. By using graph paper, the children can easily find both the perimeter and the area of their drawings! We didn't have enough time to finish this step, but all the children were able to finish up their artwork and it is ready for next week! Here are some pictures of just a few of the awesome animals that the students came up with. I couldn't believe some of the ingenuity that we saw!
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Once everyone had finished their drawing, I got my ukulele out and we learned a short song about area and perimeter to help them remember the rules for each. When we finished, all the children left, but I could hear them singing it in the halls and it made me really excited because I knew if it got stuck in their heads, they would never forget area and perimeter again!
(Visit #3)
So I just finished by third visit, and it went great! All the students were able to find the area and the perimeter of their animals! We got out a page projector and the students were all very excited to share their drawings with the entire class. My only regret is that we couldn't show everyone's drawings at once! We finished learning the song and they have now learned it in both English and French! They are such impressive students, I really can't believe it!
-Kyra
