Solid Cities

The students learned that being multi-dimensional was much more exciting than being squares!  They began by building 3-dimensional shapes from each shape's net: nets of cubes, rectangular, triangular, or octagonal prisms, cylinders, and triangular and rectangular pyramids.  They searched the web to find nets for types of hedrons and a sphere (they felt that there had to be one available for these somewhere), but one has yet to be found or produced by the more persistent students.  The students used their understanding of the given nets to then create their own nets of various sizes to build their own 3-D cities.  Wow, what a learning experience.   

Once they recognized the numbers of faces, vertices, line segments, and bases their shapes had, they drew a map of their cities showing the flatness of 2 dimensions.  No longer did their cities show depth, "have air inside", "hold gasses,"  or "stick out & have multi-dimension."  Prisms became rectangles, pyramids became triangles, or spheres and cylinders became circles, not very exciting at all.

Finally, the students created a coordinate graph that identified the center most location on their maps of each geo shape.  They learned that the lines of the graph (not the spaces) are important to number carefully for accuracy. 

The city comes to "three dimentional" life. Up it grew from the flatness of the paper.

Vertex City

My city is called Vertex City. All the shapes have a point. Every single one has a face. A lot of them are curved. My city has a lot of shapes. My Triangle pond is shaped like a rectangular pyramid. I have a little cube called Cube Farm Market. ...Sherece

My Geometric City

I used 13 shapes total on my city. the name of my geometric city is Face Factorys. Four of my shapes do not have verticies. The street is 3D Speedway. I have 2 pyramids, 5 prisims, and 6 other 3D shapes. ...Jake

The Type 1 and 4 writings by the students show their enjoyment and understanding of their building explorations.  The photographs on the next two pages show their pride in their creations.

Grade 3 Math / April 2001