Area and Measurement

Imagine you are tiling a kitchen floor 🏠. You need to know exactly how many tiles fit inside the room — not how far around the edges, but how much space is covered. That measurement is called AREA. Area tells us the amount of surface a shape covers. Today we will learn how to measure area using squares and multiplication!

The simplest way to find area is to count unit squares — squares that are each exactly 1 cm by 1 cm. Look at the grid below. Each coloured square counts as 1 cm². Count all the filled squares carefully, and that total is the area of the shape.

Counting every square works well for small shapes, but what about bigger ones? There is a quicker way! For a rectangle, multiply its LENGTH by its WIDTH. In the grid above: 5 columns × 3 rows = 15 cm². Length × Width is the area formula — think of it like repeated addition rows stacked up, just like a multiplication array.

Now let us think about units of LENGTH — the measurements we use for sides before we calculate area. There are four key units to know: millimetres (mm), centimetres (cm), metres (m), and kilometres (km). They are linked like a ladder of ten and a thousand. A centimetre is tiny — about the width of your little fingernail!

Sometimes a shape is not a simple rectangle — it is an L-shape or a staircase shape. These are called RECTILINEAR shapes (shapes made only of straight sides that meet at right angles). The trick is to split the shape into two rectangles, find each area separately using Length × Width, and then ADD the two areas together. ✂️ + ✂️ = total area!