Introduction to Volume – Manipulatives (starting with perimeter and area)

Here is a Jamboard to introduce volume and units of volume. (See photo at very bottom for making a copy to edit.)

The students start with building an animal pen and shading in the space inside. The hands on approach and connection to prior knowledge of a fenced in area for animals sets the stage for actual measurement units in subsequent slides.

The photos below show how students will count out meters and square meters, adding a formal layer to the fence they built previously.

The following slide provides an entry point to understanding volume and units for volume. The students count out cubes, building on the counting of meters and square meters. The cubes were created using WORD Paint 3D. Here is an article I used to create these. For the grid that is tilted, I used functions on WORD – see this document. (I could have used Paint again.) I then show them the prism that is created but I am not discussing shapes yet to keep the focus on the concept of volume.

I then have students recreate the volume using NCTM’s Illuminations activity called Cubes.

Finally, I show examples of volume and move from cubic units to liters (litres – as I was initially teaching this lesson to a 5th grade class in India).

Make a copy and you can edit it.

Hands on Triangles for Boring Worksheet

 

Screenshot 2017-11-24 at 5.50.18 PM

A student came to me with a geometry worksheet, excerpt in photo above. Extemporaneously I created cut out sides of a triangle to help make the concept of lengths of sides of a triangle more concrete.

The concept is that the shorter 2 sides must be longer than the 3rd side or you cannot get a triangle. The worksheet is very abstract and very inaccessible. (Actually there is more to this topic but I am keeping it simple to allow lay people to focus on the instructional strategy and not the “mathy” stuff.)

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