Description

What our Area of Rectangles Word Problems

Lesson Objectives and Overview: Area of Rectangles Word Problems teaches students how to solve real-world problems that involve the area of a rectangle or square. This lesson is for students in 3rd grade and 4th grade.

Classroom Procedure

Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the blue box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand. The supplies you will need for this lesson are scissors and the handouts. To prepare for this lesson ahead of time, you can gather the supplies and copy the handouts.

Options for Lesson

Included with this lesson is an “Options for Lesson” section that lists a number of suggestions for activities to add to the lesson or substitutions for the ones already in the lesson. One optional adjustment to the lesson activity is to use the activity problems as a quiz or test for the whole class. You can also have students create more than four problems during the activity. For an additional activity, you could have your students measure different rooms or objects in the school to find their areas. Finally, for an additional homework assignment, you could have students find the area of rooms in their homes.

Teacher Notes

The teacher notes page includes a paragraph with additional guidelines and things to think about as you begin to plan your lesson. It notes that students must already know how to multiply before you teach this lesson. This page also includes lines that you can use to add your own notes as you’re preparing for this lesson.

AREA OF RECTANGLES LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES

Finding Area of Rectangles

The Area of Rectangles lesson plan includes three pages of content. The lesson begins with a brief review and reminds students that they already know how to find the area of rectangles and squares. We call the space inside a shape the area. Squares and rectangles have both lengths and widths, and they can be joined together to create polygons with more than four sides. To calculate the area of a rectangle, you simply multiply the length by the width. For squares, the length and width will be the same number. When you calculate area, the answer is in square units.

Next, the lesson reviews how to find the area of a rectangle and other polygons using an example. The example includes three figures. The first figure is a square with a length of 3 inches and a width of 3 inches. To find the area, you multiply 3 x 3 for an answer of 9 square inches. The other two example figures are rectangles. This section also reminds students that different rectangles can be joined together to create irregular shapes.

When solving real-world problems, the problem usually doesn’t show you a diagram that only lists the lengths and widths of each figure. Instead, they might give you drawings of rooms, playgrounds, houses, and more. These problems might asks how much grass seed they need to buy to plant a yard full of grass, how much paint they need to paint the walls of a room, or how much carpet they need for a floor. All of these questions require the area to solve.

Real-World Rectangle Area Problems

The lesson begins with an example: if you want to cover your desk with a tablecloth, paint, or other material, you need to know how much of that material to buy. In order to figure that out, you need to know how much area it needs to cover. This is an example of a real-world area problem. If your desk is 3 feet wide and 2 feet long, the area is 6 square feet (3 feet x 2 feet = 6 square feet).

Real-world problems involving area can give you the lengths and widths of the relevant spaces or the area (which means you might need to find the length or width to solve the problem). Some of these problems might require you to measure the length and width yourself, or require you to create a drawing to help solve the problem.

Next, the lesson provides an example. In this example, someone wants to buy enough carpet to cover two rooms in their house. The carpet costs $1.50 per square foot. They want to know how much carpet they need and how much it will cost them. To solve, the first step is to find the area of each room. Next, you need to add the area of each room together. Finally, you need to multiply $1.50 times the total area to determine the total cost. To help you find the answer to this problem, you could have drawn a picture. Having a visual aid can be very helpful when solving area word problems. The lesson ends with a second example problem.

AREA OF RECTANGLES LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS

The Area of Rectangles lesson plan includes three worksheets: an activity worksheet, a practice worksheet, and a homework assignment. You can refer to the guide on the classroom procedure page to determine when to hand out each worksheet.

REAL-WORLD PROBLEMS ACTIVITY WORKSHEET

For the activity worksheet, students will work with a partner to create four real-world rectangle word problems for other students in the class to solve for practice. Each of the problems they create should require at least two steps. They will also create an answer key that shows how to solve each of their problems.

Students may work with alone or in a large group if you’d prefer.

SOLVING WORD PROBLEMS PRACTICE WORKSHEET

The practice worksheet asks students to read word problems carefully and solve them, drawing a picture or making a chart if necessary. They can also use a piece of scratch paper for their work if they need to.

AREA OF RECTANGLES HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT

For the homework assignment, students will use the provided drawing of the layout of a house to answer questions. To answer the questions, they will have to use the measurements provided in the diagram to calculate area.

Worksheet Answer Keys

This lesson plan includes answer keys for the practice worksheet and the homework assignment. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.