Area's of shapes

Counting squares to find the area of a shape

The squares on this grid are , so the area of each square is .

What is the area of the shape on this grid? The shape covers 8 squares, so the area is .

Being well-organised helps. One idea is to count down the rows and tick them off as you do so. This will help to avoid mistakes.

 

 

Area of triangles

You can find the area of triangles by following these steps:

• make the triangle into a rectangle
• count the squares in the rectangle
• halve the number of squares in the rectangle (divide them by 2)

To find the area of this triangle,

you first make it into a rectangle:

 

The area of the rectangle is 30 cm ² so the area of the triangle will be half of this. The area of the triangle is .