Designer Digs: Finding Area and Surface Area (Imath Readers, Level C)

Use your imagination to think about your dream room. Would it have brightly colored walls? An outer space theme? Or even a basketball hoop? Join Anela as she designs five dream rooms for a unique school project. While completing creative room designs, you will learn to use formulas to calculate perimeter, area, and surface area of both quadrilaterals and triangles. Additional applied concepts include parallel lines, right angles, irregular polygons, decomposing shapes, and area nets. Tap into your artistic side to help create these designer digs!

Gr 5-6-This subset provides an engaging mix of social science, language arts, and math. For example, in Designer Digs readers will get caught up in Anela's school project that requires her to use equations for finding area to create unusual living spaces. Each book begins with a discussion of strategies and provides several methods for solving the posed problem. Student engagement is encouraged with leading questions. Additional sections include a "Discover Activity" and an informational text section that connects the math discussion to science, history, or art. Photos, maps, illustrations, charts, and diagrams aid in comprehension. Each book ends with a "What Comes Next" page that gives ideas for expanding on the concepts learned and an "Additional Notes" section that provides answers to the various problems. These volumes are not contrived collections of math activities; readers will believe the math is part of the story. This casual and creative approach will be especially helpful to reluctant math students. Overall, a comprehensive set of CCSS resources. α(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.