Tuesday, May 13, 2008

10.3 Volume of Pyramids and Cones

To introduce this topic I told the class that we would use democracy to try and do math. So I showed the students a cone and a cylinder with the same base and height. Then I took a poll to see how many cones are needed to fill up the cylinder: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The poll resulted in answers of 2 and 4, but never 3 so democracy lost to math today. From this experiment we found that the volume of a cone was 1/3 the volume of a cylinder. Pyramids follow the same rule, so students used the new formula to work on their homework.

I had fun because I got to play with water.

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