As part of our ‘measure’ topic in Maths, Year 5 have been learning about volume. In this lesson, the children were introduced to the concept of volume as a measurement of space. To understand what volume really means, we have to understand the concept of a cubed unit (length multiplied by width multiplied by depth). We used cubes and challenged the children to create different 3D shapes with the same volume. With two different shapes in front of us containing the same number of cubes, we asked ourselves how two shapes that look so different can have the same volume?
The next challenge was to recreate the shapes in our Power Maths books and work out the volume. If each cube is 1cm cubed, then all we had to do was count the number of cubes to determine the amount of space within the shape. Could the children then work out the volume of 3D shapes without the help of cubes in front of them? If we understand that each cube must be counted to determine the total space and we understand that not all cubes can be seen in a drawing, then we know that we have to visualise the entire shape. Once we were able to determine the volume of different 3D shapes, we used isometric paper to draw our own 3D shapes with specific given volumes.
