Volume: city of the future

Recently I taught a unit on volume in my 5th grade classroom. After the Common Core State Standards a lot of the things that students learned in 4th grade math were pushed to 5th grade standards. So in my school the math specialist suggested that we simply reteach the last years' unit to the students again using the curriculum the school has for math. I thought this was the perfect opportunity to implement something more unique and engaging than the good old curriculum! I got a hold of these awesome 2 centimeter cubes that are attachable, like lego pieces and I created a project that allowed kids to construct building models using these cubes.

Above are the cubes in the packages that I prepared for the students. These wonderful cubes are called "linking cubes" and one of the many online distributors of this wonderful tool can be found by clicking here.

The premise of the project is that the kids are living in a futuristic city where global warming has taken such a toll on the quality of air that when corporations bought building they no longer paid for the area of the ground that the building took up, but also the total volume of the building. The kids had to come up with a kind of building they were to build, make a 3D model of it, draw its diagram and determine the volume using the cubes. This was a three day initiative and I was doing this lesson for my PACT so I was too overwhelmed to ever think to take photos of the wonderful models the students built!

Fortunately I do have some great samples of the written work they turned in on just the first day. The lofty plan was to get a model built on the first day. Once the model was built the kids received a large sheet of butcher paper. They were to draw a diagram of their model, calculate the volume of their model and then give a step by step description of how they calculated the volume using their models.

First sample:

Second sample:

I was so impressed by the amount of written explanation the students turned in for their calculations! Prior to setting them on the task of doing all this I did give them a self created sample of what I was asking them to do. This is what it looked like:

The two samples of student work I provided are representative of the whole group. The students worked on this in pairs and each pair produced an amazingly intricate description of their calculations. This was a great feat for them as most of the students in this class never manage to explain their answers in the realm of mathematics.