Since January we have been working on a unit in geometry titled “Do Bees Build It Best?” In this unit we learned about containers, area, trigonometry, special properties of right triangles, finding the areas of large numbered sided polygons, and working with 3-dimensional figures while achieving the surface area and volume. In the latter part of the paper, it will explain in detail all the things we learned since the beginning of the unit.
At the very beginning, we were on a mission to build a box out of construction paper, but each person had to build the biggest box they possibly could. Then we filled the boxes with cereal and measured to see which box from each table was the biggest, or held the most cereal. This was the first thing we did in this unit and I think that it was like a preview for what is ahead because it had us think about the area and capacity of the box when we were building it. From this activity I learned that even when doing the simplest little project many things can be tied into it that we learned in this unit.
We also learned about triangles while making them (along with different polygons) on geo boards. We learned how to find the area of the triangles and how to approximate the area of different weirdly shaped polygons. After about making 20 different triangles on the geo boards, we learned that the area of a triangle can be simply found with a formula. The formula that we came up with was AREA OF A TRIANGLE= ½ BASE (HEIGHT). So when we had the figure on the geo board we would just have to plug in the number for the base and the number for the height and multiply that through along with the ½. After we mastered the skill of finding the area of a triangle with and without the formula, we were on to making triangles on geo boards that would fit certain conditions (area of 2 units, vertices must be on pegs, and must have horizontal side) that we listed. In this particular activity, we made one triangle with, for example a base of 1...