This unit helps students to understand the need for standard units of volume, and explores the context of trading with people on an imaginary island called Smati, where their measures are sloshes, dribbles, and plops.
Capacity is the amount of internal space within a container. The attribute of internal space is important to housing liquids and gases, though sometimes the volumes of luggage are given in units of capacity, e.g., 40L backpack.
The base unit of capacity is the litre. The litre is the amount of space equivalent to a cube that measures 10cm x 10cm x 10cm. One litre of water has a mass of 1 kilogram at sea level. Prefixes are used to create smaller and larger units from the base unit. The most common examples of these units are the millilitre (1/1000 of a litre), the microlitre (1/1 000 000 of a litre), the kilolitre (1000 litres or 1 cubic metre). In European countries it is common to encounter cL, centilitres (1/100 of 1 litre or 10mL). Note that in the New Zealand Curriculum document, the terms "volume" and "capacity" are used interchangeably.
The learning opportunities in this unit are very practical. Differentiation of tasks to meet the needs of students can occur in a variety of ways:
Tasks can be varied in many ways including:
The contexts for this unit can be adapted to suit the interests and cultural backgrounds of your students. Give purpose to the mathematics through context. For example, use containers that students are familiar with from their daily lives. Trading with a Pacific Island nation will mean more to students if they have whānau in places like Samoa, Tokelau, Niue, or Rarotonga, or have visited Pacific nations. Look for videos of Pacific Island nations to help students to interpret the context. The learning in this unit could also be linked to learning about early trading between Māori and Pākehā peoples. Also, consider when students use units of capacity, for tasks like cooking, catering at a party or feast, providing beverages for a sports team, or watering plants.
Dear parents and whānau
In maths we are working on understanding volume and metric measures. Please can you help by sending your oddest shaped empty bottles to school with your child.
Smatians Problem
One of the problems that we have been working on with the class is the problem of the Smatians who are an imaginary group of people. The Smatians have a special type of juice (that comes from the Calculation tree). This juice gives them the power to add fractions together in their heads! Smatians keep the Calculation juice in funny shaped containers:
Have fun discussing with your child which is biggest; a cribble, a clop or a closh?
Have them work out the metric equivalent of cribbles, clops and closhes, and tell you how they worked it out.
Printed from https://meaningfulmaths.nt.edu.au/mmws/nz/resource/slosh-dribble-and-plop at 8:45pm on the 26th February 2024