OBJECTIVES

 To build up and use approaches to calculate perimeters, areas.

SKILLS

 To measure something using familiar and conventional units and to express the result of this measurement.
 To understand and use in their context the usual terms specific to geometry.
 To describe the way the elements composing a production are organised.

MATERIALS

 Paper
 Pencil

REFERENCES

Enghien Park

PROCEDURES

Work in partnership with the Environment Initiation Centre, a service set in the park of Enghien Castle, in order to implement a two-way partnership between the teacher and the specialized guide. Each partner uses their specific skills to bring into class life the skills and notions tackled by the pupils during the activities.

In the flower garden, the children are first of all in a position to observe : in groups and without any measuring instrument, they have to reproduce the design of one of the flowerbeds on a sheet of paper.

Then, all the designs are gathered so as to reconstitute the whole of the garden.

What can be observed ? There is a problem of scale. It is impossible to reconstitute it consistently with the drawings made by the groups, proportions have not been respected.

How can this problem be solved ? Representing things life-size is just impossible !

The children search, try and make mistakes.

Little by little, the need to use a unit of measurement and a common divisor will emerge in order to make a reproduction to scale on a map. At the beginning, the unit of measurement need not be the metre or the centimetre, it may as well be a shoe, a foot,…

Make links with the garden’s history.

FOLLOW-ON-ACTIVITIES

Application and structuring of the elements discovered for the development of skills linked to mathematics and geometry.

TRANSPOSITION

The activity can be experienced in a more structured and analytic way by elder children.

Lucie Fachinat. Julie Cottet Cindy Siraut Valérie Philippe Haute Ecole roi Baudouin, Braine-le-Comte, Belgique