Explore Volume with Mini Cube Cities

It's April. Time for a little "art break" in math class. In this case, I wanted students to apply what they've learned about volume. I pulled out the isometric drawing paper and we got busy, each student designing a "Mini Metropolis."

I led them through step-by-step practice sheets to learn how to draw cubes and rectangular prisms. Almost immediately I heard, "...this is cool!" followed by "...this is like Minecraft [video game]!"

To make the drawings just a wee bit more 3-D, we learned to do a little shading.

After practice, I gave each City Planner a "Design a Mini Metropolis" sheet and related table. The assignment required them to:

1. draw some buildings with given dimensions, calculating volume
2. draw some buildings with a given volume, calculating dimensions
3. invent some buildings, calculating dimensions & volume

Rulers kept our lines straight.

If we needed help making rectangular prisms with a given volume, centimeter cubes helped.

Aren't the buildings lovely?

We planned for roads, parks, foliage and other metropolis necessities!

Students loved this lesson. Some of them have continued drawing ever since we began this assignment, printing out more isometric dot paper at home.

If you are interested in purchasing the lesson, you'll find it here.