Area

In Primary 7 children will need to work out how to find the area of an irregular shape,
Often, not all the measurements of each side will be given to make this harder.

A good way of finding the area of an irregular shape is to split the shape up into smaller shapes and then work out the area of each of these. The areas of the individual smaller shapes can then be added up to find the answer.
Children in P.7 also learn to calculate the area of parallelograms (base x height) and triangles (base x height ÷
Children will sometimes be asked to solve worded puzzles or investigations about area, where no pictorial representation is given, for example:
A rectangle has a perimeter of 36cm. What could the area of this shape be?
There is more than one possible answer to this question. One way of working out a possible answer would be to draw a rectangle and then work out what the length of the sides could be if the perimeter is 36cm.
This will probably involve a lot of trial and error. A child might finally arrive at the measurements 10cm and 8cm (a rectangle has four sides, so the perimeter would be 10cm + 8cm + 10cm + 8cm). To find the area, they would need to remember the formula for area (length x width), so multiplying 10 x 8 to make 80cm2.