Teaching Area

On April 1st I taught my math lesson. My cooperating teacher told me that I should give them a lesson on area. She has the lowest level of math students so she said that they pretty much don't know anything about area. I made my lesson an introduction lesson and made it very simple so that the students could simply gain an understanding of area and understand what is used to measure area. I first asked them some questions about what they knew about area and explained to them how to measure the area of something. I showed them examples of measuring shapes on a poster board that I made. I showed them how to fill it with squares and count them to find the area. The students seemed to have a good understanding of this concept. I handed out worksheets with pictures of two shapes on them. They had to guess which one they thought was bigger and then measure them to find out. The worksheets got harder as the lesson moved on. I eventually told them to start guessing exactly how big they thought each shape was so that they could try to gain an understanding of estimation. The students had fun trying to guess how big the shapes were and finding out the answers. Some of the students kept on saying that the person next to them was cheating by looking at their answers. I did not really know how to deal with this situation, so I just told them to focus on their own work. The students had a really good grasp on the concept of area and how to measure it. I felt like they could have been challenged even more if I had introduced the concept of length x width. I really think the students could have understood this and I would have had a lot of fun teaching it to them. If I had known how quickly they would grasp the concept of area, I would have planned to incorporate length x width into my lesson. However, the lesson went really well and the students enjoyed it. They were actively engaged the whole time and loved using the manipulatives to measure their shapes. I enjoyed this lesson a lot.