Snowman Perimeter and Area Activity

Happy Winter! :) I live in Iowa, where Winter can always be...unpredictable. We had a pretty mild November and December. Then January came. Snow came, and the negative temperatures hit. Then Thursday was 50 degrees. Now it's back down to -20. Seriously, don't move to the Midwest if you can help it. #midwestisnotalwaysbest

Anyways! When we headed back to school, I thought of a little activity I could do with my students to quickly introduce them to area and perimeter. You see, we have Iowa Assessments coming up the first week of February (and conferences!!!) Still mad about that double whammy. 

Anyways, January always acts as the month my colleagues and I try to introduce concepts that we know we can't master by assessments, but need to at least give a brief lesson on before the assessment. One of those being area and perimeter. I'm not sure if it's because we went to school a week later this year, or my group of kiddos, but I feel like we are so behind in math!

They loved this quick activity, and it acts as the perfect January bulletin board on our faux chalkboard in our room.

Pretty adorable...right?!

So I gave each student a sheet of centimeter grid paper. I used a printable from my EnVisions textbook, but you could use this free here.

I told them they were going to create a snowman! It was up to them if they wanted their snowman to have 3 snowballs or 2, be tall and skinny, or short and plump! They were obviously excited, and began outlining their snowmen in pencil. Once they had their pieces drawn out, they cut out the snowballs. Some decided to make big ones and then glue them together, and some kept the shape together and cut around.

After they had their snowmen, I allowed them to color and decorate. Then I gave a brief lesson about area and perimeter, and how we use them. I then used my example to show them how to find the area and perimeter of their snowmen. I actually did the distributive property by adding the 2 areas of my snowballs. 

Do you see my mistake?!?!?!
I accidentally counted the little piece that my head overlaps on my body twice! My area should actually be 76 sq units. OOPS!

 Then they filled out their tags and pasted them to their snowmen!

Want to build your own snowmen?! Grab my tags here!

Enjoy! If you do this activity, please share with me on my Facebook page, or tag me on Instagram!

I used my January Seller Kit for the mint falling snowflake background, and snowflakes on the tags!