Students will continue visualizing and drawing the top front and side view of rectangular prisms. They will explore the relationship between the area of the base and the height of the prism, and the total volume in cubic units.

The purpose of the Day 4 activities is to reinforce key concepts from Days 1, 2 and 3. Students will engage in a string of related problems through a math talk and will have an opportunity to complete independent purposeful practice.

The math talk and purposeful practice serve to develop a deeper understanding of the following big ideas:

• Volume and capacity can be measured using non-standard and standard units;
• A rectangular prism has three views. It can be viewed from the top, front and side. Each of these three faces are two dimensional, with a length and a width;
• A rectangular prism has three dimensions, which can be described using three linear measurements; the length, the width and the height;
• The measurements of length, width, and height are used to determine volume;
• Volume can be determined by multiplying the area of the base by the height of the prism;
• Volume is related to the operations of multiplication and addition;
• A solid figure which can be packed without gaps or overlaps using a quantity of unit cubes is said to have a volume of that same quantity of cubic units.

Share each total volume of a rectangular prism one at a time. Encourage students to determine the prism made of linking cubes that could have this total volume. Draw the top, front, and side view. Label the dimensions.

10 cubes
20 cubes
40 cubes
32 cubes

Students will have an opportunity to independently complete practice to reinforce concepts related to volume without the use of a calculator.

As students are working, you might consider using this opportunity to pose purposeful questions and document student thinking for the purpose of formative assessment.

Pay close attention to the strategies that students are using.

Are students: 

• Using linking cubes.
• Using a pictorial representation and drawing the boxes.
• Using a 3D array.
• Using a formula or numeric representation.
• Using addition.
• Using skip-counting.
• Using multiplication.

While students are working independently, you might also consider strategically pulling students individually or in small groups to offer guided instruction in order to move them along their developmental continuum.

Question #1:

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Question #2:

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Question #3:

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Question #4:

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We suggest collecting this reflection as an additional opportunity to engage in the formative assessment process to inform next steps for individual students as well as how the whole class will proceed.

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