Reply To: Where Do You Even Start?

[Kyle Pearce]

Hi Laura!

Tough times indeed during emergency remote learning… especially for students who have struggled in the past.

In this case, it would appear that this student is not grasping a conceptual understanding of area.

For example:

• could this student approximate how many “squares” (inch squares, centimetre squares, etc.) it would take to “cover” the triangle?
• does he understand that the area of the triangle is half of the area of a rectangle with the same length and height of the triangle?
• etc.?

Just some thoughts on how one might go back to work on the conceptual piece as memorizing an algorithm is not going to help this student for very long.

A set of visual prompts that might help you on Math Is Visual can be found here:

http://mathisvisual.com/area-rectangle/

What are your thoughts?