8.7 Surface Area

Surface area was introduced through the context of cutting up a cube, or box, and laying it out and measuring the area of each piece.

I think that this is a massive section to cover in a day or two. In this chapter we are looking at:

• Prisms
• Pyramids
• Cones
• Cylinders

I think that this would be a good chapter to break up into a couple parts and look at with a little bit more detail then I was able to. I think things would go more smoothly if we looked at prisms and pyramids one day, then cylinders and cones the next day. This would allow for students to make a stronger connection from prism/pyramid formula to the cone/cylinder formula.

I think it is good to develop an intuition for looking at objects in 3-D. But rushing through this section doesn't do much to help build this intuition.

The vocabulary and 3-D intuition comes back into play in chapter 10 when looking at volumes of 3D objects.