More figuring on the farm!

Scott and I drove down to Mayer, MN yesterday to bring 17 of our steers to another farm.  So, today we had to ween some other calves off of milk.  We had to take 7 steers/heifers from the machine shed and put them in pen 1, then take 4 out of huts, and 4 out of the pen in the barn to put in the machine shed pen.  WHEW! It is a lot faster to type that then to actually do it.  When you want them to move, they don't!

So, the question arose from the boys, how big is pen 1 and 2?  HMM....  Well, I just so happen to know how to figure that out!  We need to find the area, and to do that we need to multiply the length by the width.  It amazes me how much math we do in our daily lives.

Well, to get on with our math problem of the day,  we needed to figure out the area of each pen.  To figure that out we needed to measure.  This layout that I found is pretty close to ours.
 

Instead of taking out the tape measure we just multiplied 2 by 12, we have two twelve foot gates, and 3 by 12 for the other direction.  To find the area of pen 1 we need to multiply 24 x 36, which equals 864 square feet.  We did the same thing for pen 2.  Pen 2 is bigger. 7 gates long by 4 gates wide.  I asked Evan what we had to do first.  "multiply by 12!" 
Right on man!!  So now for pen 2 we have 7x12 and 4x12.  We take 84x48 to get 4032 square feet.  To find the total of both pens we just need to add the two totals together and we 4896.  So!  That is how we figure out how big our pens are.
I did some math standards research and it looks like at about grade four MN students start to learn about area of shapes.  Evan will be going into grade four, so hopefully this summer will be a good prep for him!

Here is a great catchy video that could be used in the classroom, I think students would get a kick out of it!