Purpose: Engages students and introduces elements needed for building a playground.

In “Playground Palooza”, students will take the role of a playground designer responding to a request for a new playground at the school. Students will learn about numerical patterns, reading and writing decimals, rounding decimals, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing decimals, converting measurements, volume, measuring volume, relating volume, coordinate planes, and attributes of 2D figures. Students will determine the total area of the new playground, determine the total area for each structure you want included on your playground, determine the volume of sand needed for the sandbox, use at least three playground structures, create a table of equipment and materials including company name, cost, quantity, and totals, create a coordinate system to display the center point for each structures or area on the playground, and submit a blueprint of their playground design.

***NOTE
This PBL was created before NC adopted the NC standards for Math. Therefore this PBL also addresses: rounding decimals.

Students make quadrilaterals on a geoboard that meet given criteria and then draw each shape on geoboard paper and identify it.

Students create a Hierarchy Diagram using several terms related to two-dimensional figures. They are to cut out the diagram, place them in the appropriate section and list the properties specific to each quadrilateral.

This activity is designed to help students overcome the confusion that can arise when they learn that a square is also a rectangle—and a rhombus and a parallelogram. Students create a flowchart to visualize the properties of quadrilaterals. In the finished flowchart, the quadrilateral is at the top and the square is at the bottom, because the square has the greatest number of properties.

This activity gives students the opportunity to use concrete and dynamic representations of the shapes. At the completion of this activity, students will have a discovered a list of properties for each of the six special quadrilaterals. The final page of the quiz enables students to summarize all their findings in a table that can be retained for future use.

This short video and interactive assessment activity is designed to teach fifth graders about identifying the properties of rectangles.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 5th Grade Math. 

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 5th Grade Math. 

This short video and interactive assessment activity is designed to give fifth graders an overview of squares and rectangles.

This task is from Tools 4 NC Teachers. Students plot points and solve problems related to points on a coordinate plane. This is remixable.

In this lesson students learn to classify quadrilaterals, including trapezoids, with a focus on different types of parallelograms. They learn the relationships among rectangles, squares, and rhombuses as different types of parallelograms.