options: Geometry: students learn to classify geometric figures by their properties, and understand and compare the relationships between them. Students develop and use formulas to compute lengths, areas, and volumes, and they use transformations to generate new shapes and compare existing ones. Geometry can be studied with and without coordinates.

Ratios & Proportional Relationships: students learn to recognize, describe, represent, and reason with ratios, rates, proportional relationships, and percent.

Operations & Algebra: students learn to solve problems using algebraic thinking and operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. They may learn to identify and explain arithmetic patterns, evaluate or manipulate numerical expressions, and reason with equations and inequalities.

Counting & Cardinality: students learn to know number names and the count sequence, count to tell the number of objects, and compare numbers.

Number & Operations in Base Ten: students learn to work with the base-ten system and build place value understanding.

Number & Operations - Fractions: students learn to understand fractions as numbers and may work with them using addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

Modeling: students learn to choose and use appropriate mathematics and statistics to analyze real-world empirical situations, improve decisions, and report on their conclusions and the reasoning behind them.

Functions: students learn to define, use, and evaluate functions to model relationships between quantities.

Number Systems and Quantity: students learn to understand the complex number system and reason quantitatively.

Measurement & Data: students learn to work with data and measure attributes such as time, money, length, area, and volume. They may learn to compare measurements to operations and convert between different units of measure.

Statistics & Probability: students learn to analyze and produce data distributions, and build understanding of univariate and bivariate data. They learn to interpret data, make statistical inferences, justify conclusions, understand rules of probability, and use probability to make decisions.
problem_activity: Narrative
The purpose of this activity is for students draw and shade rectangles with a unit fraction side length and a whole number side length. Then they find the areas of the shaded regions. The tactile experience of drawing and shading encourages students to count the number of shaded parts and then either reason about their size or think about moving them to make full unit squares. They also consider a diagram where not all of the unit squares are shown. Students estimate how many of the unit squares are hidden. This helps to highlight that finding the total area can be done with multiplication where one factor is the area of each shaded part and the other factor is the total number of shaded parts (MP7).
Required Materials
Materials to Copy
Grid Paper 5
Launch
Groups of 2
Give students grid paper.
Activity
5–7 minutes: independent work time
5 minutes: partner work time
Monitor for students who:
use the grid structure on the paper to draw their rectangles
count the number of unit squares that might be hidden under the yellow rectangle
Student Facing
Represent each rectangle on grid paper:
\(\frac{1}{2}\)
unit by 1 unit
\(\frac{1}{2}\)
unit by 2 units
\(\frac{1}{2}\)
unit by 3 units
\(\frac{1}{2}\)
unit by 4 units
Find the area of each rectangle that you drew.
What information do you need to find the area of the shaded region?
[IMG]
What might the area of the shaded region be? Explain or show your reasoning.
Student Response
Teachers with a valid work email address can
click here to register or sign in
for free access to Student Response.
Advancing Student Thinking
If students do not draw the rectangles correctly, show them the shaded region from the previous activity with side lengths 6 units and
\(\frac{1}{2}\)
unit and ask “How could you adapt this diagram to show a rectangle that is 4 units by
\(\frac{1}{2}\)
unit?”
Activity Synthesis
Display a student generated image of the
\(\frac{1}{2}\)
unit by 4 unit rectangle.
Ask previously selected students to describe how they drew they 4 by
\(\frac{1}{2}\)
rectangle.
Display image from student workbook of the rectangle that is partly covered.
“What do you need to know to determine the area of the shaded region?” (We need to know how many unit squares are under the yellow rectangle.)
“How many unit squares do you think make up the rectangle?” (6 or 7)
“How did you use the number of these unit squares to make an estimate for the shaded region?” (I know that each shaded blue rectangle is
\(\frac{1}{2}\)
of a square so if there are 6 or 7 of those, that would be
\(\frac{6}{2}\)
or
\(\frac{7}{2}\)
square units.)


correct_option_index: 5