This task presents students with some creative geometric ways to represent the fraction one half. The goal is both to appeal to students' visual intuition while also providing a hands on activity to decide whether or not two areas are equal.

This is a rectangle subdivision task; ideally instead of counting each square. students should break the letters into rectangles, multiply to find the areas, and add up the areas. However, students should not be discouraged from using individual counting to start if they are stuck. Often students will get tired of counting and devise the shortcut method themselves.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important asects of the task and its potential use. Here are the first few lines of the commentary for this task: Find the area of each colored figure. Each grid square is 1 inch long....

This resource links to both Measurement & Data progression documents published by the Common Core Writing Teams in June 2011.

Math unit about understanding Perimeter and Area using Khan Academy materials. Appropriate for grades 3-5.