Geometric Modeling: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Day 1

7 teachers like this lesson
Print Lesson


SWBAT apply geometric concepts to solve problems.

Big Idea


Do Now

5 minutes

Throughout the course, I have taught many concepts in the context of the books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a mathematics professor at Oxford University.  Much mathematics is embedded into his stories. In this unit, I have created problems based on Alice's travels through Wonderland.

As students walk in the room, I give them a slip of paper with a passage from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Students answer a question based on information from the text. They use prior knowledge to solve the problem. This problem involves the circles concepts needed for today's activity. 

We discuss the problem and go over the solution.


10 minutes

In today's Mini-Lesson we go over a problem in order to review the formula for finding the volume of cylinders, which were learned in a previous lesson (G.GMD.3). We also go over how to find the surface area of a cylinder. This problem for the Mini-Lesson bridges between the Do Now and the Activity.


25 minutes

Today's Activity asks students to answer questions based on information from a passage from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. They read the passage and then answer the questions independently or in pairs. These  questions are complex, multi-step problems (G.GMG.1, G.GMG.3, MP1, MP2, MP4). I expect that some of my students may work with scientific notation, I will encourage the use of this form of numbers to make calculations and comparisons more efficient. 

After about 15 minutes of student work time, we will go over the questions together. To get things rolling, I plan to ask a student to read the problem and give the answer. Then, I will poll the class to see if they agree with the answer and if they got the same answer. Depending on the level of agreement, I will prompt students to explain why the answer is or is not correct (MP3).  


5 minutes

At the end of the lesson, I have the students choose one of the questions from the activity and write an explanation of their thought process for how they solved the problem. I give the students about 3 minutes to write their response and then I ask a few students to share their explanation. This activity leads into the next lesson where students will be solving more multi-step problems.