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Getting carried away with perimeter and area is so much fun! The first page of the pdf was just straight rectangles calculating perimeter in linear units and area in square units. There are so many ways to calculate perimeter (2L + 2W or 2(L+W)) or just use your pencil point to count each linear unit by ones (not very exciting but effective). I prefer, adding the length and the width and then doubling that sum.

Many careers like architecture, aeronautical and graphic design, engineering, farming, sports, painting, construction, manufacturing, military applications, boating, the coast guard, and many others include the use of area and perimeter on a regular basis.  Perimeter is the linear  (one dimensional) distance around the outline of the rectangle.

After creating Sonobe Cubes last week, many of the children started to create dice out of their cubes. 

Last week’s hexagonal prisms of linear ratio 1:2:3 brought us to a discussion of dimensions of a cube. We looked at the building blocks of a cube: square faces, edges, and vertices, each a face, edge and vertex. The cube itself or any solid is three dimensions (we can use any three of the words “base, length, width, height, depth, or breadth” as long as they are on different planes. All solids are three dimensional (like the cube).

We had an exploration this week comparing solids with a linear ratio of 1:2:3, an area ratio of 1:4:9, and a volume ratio of 1:8:27. We were able to prove that the small prism held 10 pieces of candy while the medium prism held exactly 80 pieces and the large prism held exactly 270 pieces.