Day 6 - Volume and Surface Area of Composite Shapes

Today we worked on the surface area and volume of composite shapes:

We started with an example and we only did one. I liked that I didn't try to do more. They did understand it well and their attention really only lasted in doing that one example. There were lots of practice questions:

I tried a strategy that I learned from one of the books regarding learning mathematics and discussed at our last Mathematics Learning Communities meeting - I asked students to do the easiest and the hardest question from each section. They also had to explain why they made the choice that they did. That way they have to look at all the questions but only put pencil to paper for a few. I felt like this strategy worked the way I wanted it to. Students put more thought into what they would do to solve the questions and actually got started. In the past, faced with this work, students would be daunted and not even start. This wasn't the most exciting of lessons, but it seemed to work well. I wanted to have a bit of practice under their belt before they get to do something fun with this concept.