I just love when students are so excited to extend an activity! During the Notice and Wonder portion of this lesson, a lot of students wondered why those four letters were the ones given. Was it because they are at the beginning of the alphabet? Is it because they have the same area? What would happen with other letters?

Today, Mrs. Sharp gave them the chance to play around with others letters. She asked them to design their own letter and find its area. It is so interesting to see their choice of letters, the way they chose to decompose the shape and their math work all around it. Many of them made multiple shapes because they just wanted to keep going…that is always so AMAZING to hear!

I also see all of this being SO helpful when they find volume of figures composed of two non-overlapping rectangular prisms in 5th grade!

Here are just a few of the creations they came up with in class today: