MFM2P - Day 27 (Volume & Surface Area of Prisms & Cylinders)

I am at a math conference today through Sunday so today's and tomorrow's blog posts are what should be happening in my class in my absence. I suspect reality will be somewhat different!

Today's warm up is this Would You Rather:

I happily let my students use their phones to find out the mass of a penny (hmmm, we don't have pennies in Canada anymore) and the mass of a quarter. I suspect that some groups will work with the mass of American coins (because when they Google it that may come up first if the word Canadian is not in there) while others will have Canadian coin masses which will be slightly different. So here is what I found:

and then I looked for the Canadian equivalent and this is what I found.

For the penny:

For the quarter:

Whoa! Look at the mass of a penny from 1908 to 1920. There is some interesting data in here that would likely had led me on a tangent with my class (!). I love that both the US Mint and Canadian mint list the masses in grams and that the Would You Rather is in pounds. Students need to do some conversions in context and make sense of their answers. Wish I had some student work to show.

After the warm up they will work on yesterday's handout some more. I hope they will realize that the volume of a prism and a cylinder is the area of the base multiplied by the height. Having them estimate first, with actual blocks or pictures of blocks, should help them see the layers.

They will spend the last part of class doing Andrew Stadel's File Cabinet 3-act activity. 

I love this one and they do too.