Area with GeoBoards

I was doing shapes( squares, rectangles and triangle) with 4th and 5th grade children. Then I thought of introducing areas also to them. Doing areas with formulas would be a little difficult for them as they are not yet fully comfortable with multiplication. Then I got to know about GeoBoards. Geoboard is material where children can make all kinds of different shapes they want using rubber bands. It has 64 little squares. Once they make a square or rectangle, all they need to do is to count the number of squares present inside the shape they made. For triangles, we needed to make a rectangle and draw a diagonal so that it makes two triangles inside the rectangle. Area of one triangle is then half the area of the rectangle. As they got more used to it, they didn’t count the little squares anymore and instead they counted the rows and columns to find out the area. Children found it pretty interesting and they could get it quite easily. With material in hand the class is never boring!