Well, we certainly gave our maths shelf a workout when we did our area investigations recently. Our task was to find items that could cover a piece of coloured paper without gaps or overlaps. We discovered that coins and counters are NOT the best items to use to cover the paper, because they left many gaps – as you can see below.
However, items such as pencils, dominoes, blocks and tessellating shapes were perfect for the task! We had to take care when placing the items, making sure that there were no spaces left on the paper. Then, we counted how many of each item it took to cover the area.