Real Life Maths: Measuring the Area and Perimeter of Our Homes

It's important for children to gain deep understandings of how we use the maths we explore in our classrooms to real life situations.  If children don't understand the relevance, their engagement and curiosity diminishes. 


To help us find out how we measure area and perimeter in real life, we began by measuring them on this fictional house floor plan. 

We discussed the ratio key and techniques used in the drawing as an example:

For home learning, we then created floor plans of our own flats/houses and measured the area and perimeter of each room:

When sharing our floor plans in groups, we asked each other the following questions as an oral reflection:

° What strategies did you use to measure the area and perimeters?

° What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?

° What did this activity help you to understand about area or perimeter?

As a whole class, we discussed how much we enjoyed this maths activity and a few remarked how it also helped deepen their understanding of how we use decimals in real life too. 

Real life maths always engages and provides deepened understandings for children than a dreary worksheet or textbook could ever hope to achieve......