Introducing Perimeter

As with all maths topics, before we start asking children to tackle work in an abstract way we need to help them understand and visualise it, feel it and use it in a real-life situation. If we don’t understand it or what it is, how are we going to answer questions on paper?

Perimeter is a great topic to experience practically and following this process will help to give children in Year 3 and beyond a really in-depth understanding and help them tackle problems on paper more effectively and confidently:

Walking around a shape → Measuring around a shape → Adding the lengths → Solving problems

So let’s forget about pen and paper maths, using worksheets and textbooks and instead start our topic on perimeter with practical hands-on activities that will help our children understand what perimeter is and retain the information so that they can use it for more abstract questions later on. Below are a range of practical activities that you can do with your children to get them up and moving and exploring perimeter the fun way! If you want these in a FREE printable version, add your email address below and we’ll send them to you:

Getting to Grips with Perimeter the Practical Way

So now you’ve immersed your children in practical perimeter and they have a really good understanding of what it is and how they can begin to calculate it. Through play they have:

• developed their language around perimeter
• enhanced their problem solving skills
• revisited and embedded deeper learning
• formed new neural connections in their brain and strengthened existing pathways
• released neurochemicals in the brain which make the brain more receptive to learning and facilitated the acquisition of new skills.

Now you can begin to introduce more abstract problems, but we can still do this through play. Perimeter Match is a great game to start with this, where children need to use square counting to match the shape to the correct perimeter. It can be played as a race against others or simply an individual game without any time pressure.

• Encourage children to talk about anything they have spotted when they are calculating the area.
• Can they come up with a formula for calculating it themselves? This helps learning to stick much more than being told via an IWB.
• Can they think of any mnemonic-type tricks to help them remember what perimeter is? I used to encourage children to remember that the word PERIMETER has the word RIM in it which is the outer edge of a (circular) object.

Once we’ve really got to grips with perimeter we can then tackle problems like Perimeter Chain. This is a great game for small groups to work on together, calculating the perimeter of both regular and irregular shapes to complete the chain of cards.

By the time you have played with perimeter in this way, your children will be confident in what it is and how to calculate it and there’s not been a worksheet or textbook in sight!