11+ area and perimeter

Area, perimeter and volume

11+ area and perimeter questions enable the examiners to assess lots of different skills within one question. It’s not enough to simply be able to find the area of a triangle (1/2 base x height) or understand that, to find the perimeter of a square, you just multiply one of the side lengths by 4, the children will usually be asked to calculate the area of compound shapes with missing side lengths or find the area/ perimeter of shapes that are made of a combination of other shapes such as triangles standing on top of rectangles! There are countless combinations of skills required with lots of applied problem solving. The least your child needs to know is:

- how to calculate the area of a triangle

- how to calculate the area of a parallelogram

- how to calculate the area of a compound shape (by splitting it in 2, finding each area then adding back together), especially one with missing lengths

- how to find area by counting squares and half squares

- how to calculate volume

The following website has some super clips and videos to help:

Area and volume - KS2 Maths - BBC Bitesize