Little Cities: Geometry

This unit is part of the Contexts for Learning Mathematics series, a math resource used around the world in elementary schools. The focus of this unit is the extension of children’s earlier work on navigation, map-making, and the drawing of 2-D shapes to the building of 3-D prisms as models for buildings in a miniature city. Within this context, children revisit known 2-D shapes, identifying and drawing triangles, quadrilaterals, and hexagons, and explore how to transform them into 3-D prisms. These models, produced from folding the provided nets, are then taped and placed on maps of city streets. As the unit continues, students discuss how each net has a rectangular surface area that wraps around the sides, and the number of faces of the buildings and their sizes depend on the shape of the polygon base and the lengths of its sides. Next, they make rectangular arrays for tiled patios, determining how many square tiles are needed to cover each area. Along the way, they also discover and prove that the patios have been partitioned fairly into 4 equal areas even though the resulting shapes look different. Read more