The purpose of this activity is to engage students in solving a problem involving volumes of cuboids.
This activity assumes the students have experience in the following areas:
The problem is sufficiently open ended to allow the students freedom of choice in their approach. It may be scaffolded with guidance that leads to a solution, and/or the students might be given the opportunity to solve the problem independently.
The example responses at the end of the resource give an indication of the kind of response to expect from students who approach the problem in particular ways.
A cheesemaker exports 25 kg slabs of cheese with a base area of 1000 cm².
If a 1 kg block of cheese has dimensions 15 x 8 x 4 cm³, how high is each slab?
The following prompts illustrate how this activity can be structured around the phases of the Mathematics Investigation Cycle.
Introduce the problem. Allow students time to read it and discuss in pairs or small groups.
Discuss ideas about how to solve the problem. Emphasise that, in the planning phase, you want students to say how they would solve the problem, not to actually solve it.
Allow students time to work through their strategy and find a solution to the problem.
Allow students time to check their answers and then either have them pair share with other groups or ask for volunteers to share their solution with the class.
The student uses multiplication by the edge lengths of the 1 kg block to calculate its volume in metric units. They divide by the base area to find the height of the slab in centimetres.
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The student calculates the base area of the 1 kg block and finds out how many of the blocks fit into 1000 cm2. By calculating how many layers of blocks will include 25 kg of cheese they work out the height. They show good understanding of fractions.
Printed from https://meaningfulmaths.nt.edu.au/mmws/nz/resource/cheese-blocks at 8:51pm on the 26th February 2024