Allow your students to explore the pros and cons of different strategies used to find the area of rectangles. Use this as a stand alone lesson or as a pre-lesson for the Multiplication and Area in the Community Garden lesson.

Practice calculating perimeter with the placement of carnival-themed games with given rectangular dimensions. Your students will use grid paper to determine the location of all the games they choose to make the perfect carnival.

Refresh students on the relationship between decimals and fractions when they multiply to find the area! They will find the area of a location in a picture by converting mixed numbers to a decimals and then using the area equation.