Finding Surface Area

I am only in my third year of teaching, but I know that in the past, my students have always had trouble with surface area. I had to come up with something new this year to help them understand what surface area ACTUALLY is!

I started taking a bunch of pop cubes and putting them together to make 6 rectangular prisms of different sizes. I then put my students into 6 different groups.

I began to explain that surface area is the area of all of the sides added ALTOGETHER! I explained that it was like trying to figure out exactly how much wrapping paper you would need to wrap a present. To find the surface area of the rectangular prism pop cubes, students had to count the squares on the top and bottom, left and right, and front and back sides, then they had to add them up together to find the surface area.

I gave the groups about 2 minutes to find the surface area of the rectangular prism, then students rotated the prisms clockwise to the next group.

After we finished this activity, we moved to nets and then to other prisms and pyramids!

It was like a light bulb turned on when they got it!