The purpose of this activity is to engage students in using non-standard units to solve a problem involving area.
This activity assumes the students have experience in the following areas:
The problem is sufficiently open ended to allow the students freedom of choice in their approach. It may be scaffolded with guidance that leads to a solution, and/or the students might be given the opportunity to solve the problem independently.
The example responses at the end of the resource give an indication of the kind of response to expect from students who approach the problem in particular ways.
An origami box, folded from the biggest square that can be cut from a sheet of A4 paper, just fits a post-it note in its base.
The height of that box is half a post-it note. Use an unfolded origami box to work out how many post-it notes fit within the biggest square of a sheet of A4 paper.
The following prompts illustrate how this activity can be structured around the phases of the Mathematics Investigation Cycle.
Introduce the problem. Allow students time to read it and discuss in pairs or small groups.
Discuss ideas about how to solve the problem. Emphasise that, in the planning phase, you want students to say how they would solve the problem, not to actually solve it.
Allow students time to work through their strategy and find a solution to the problem.
Allow students time to check their answers and then either have them pair share with other groups or ask for volunteers to share their solution with the class.
The student recognises that each folded square is one quarter of a post-it note. They use multiplication to find the number of quarters in the large square and divides that number by four to get the total number of post-it notes.
Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close.
The student divides the large square into strips and calculates the number of post-it notes in a strip, using the triangles as a unit of area. They multiply the answer by four to get the total number of post-it notes.
Printed from https://meaningfulmaths.nt.edu.au/mmws/nz/resource/folding-boxes at 8:51pm on the 26th February 2024