Unit: Area and Surface Area
Lesson 12: What is Surface Area?
This lesson introduces students to the concept of surface area. They use what they learned about area of rectangles to find the surface area of prisms with rectangular faces.
Students begin exploring surface area in concrete terms, by estimating and then calculating the number of square sticky notes it would take to cover a filing cabinet. Because students are not given specific techniques ahead of time, they need to make sense of the problem and persevere in solving it (MP1). The first activity is meant to be open and exploratory. In the second activity, they then learn that the surface area (in square units) is the number of unit squares it takes to cover all the surfaces of a three-dimensional figure without gaps or overlaps (MP6).
Later in the lesson, students use cubes to build rectangular prisms and then determine their surface areas.
- Subject:
- Geometry
- Mathematics
- Measurement and Data
- Material Type:
- Activity/Lab
- Date Added:
- 04/07/2021
