Volume In Action with NES 5th Graders

We were happy to be back at Northside Elementary School for our second year of the Volume in Action workshop with 5th graders. This partnership began last year when Northside educators invited Prism to help students strengthen their understanding of compound volume through hands-on design. It’s a collaboration that reflects trust, creativity, and support for teachers and students alike.

This year, we returned as the architects and the students were the volume experts. Together, we reviewed how to calculate the volume of compound shapes and explored how those same concepts are used by architects in real life. We even calculated the volume of their school before diving into model building.

Each student group had already created a unique city site plan on paper, complete with streets, parks, and shared spaces. Our role was to help them bring those plans to life in three dimensions. Using paper and chipboard, students built model buildings to add to their city blueprints, transforming their ideas from 2D to 3D and preparing to calculate the volume of each structure.

One Northside educator shared, “Heather did an outstanding job engaging my students and creating meaningful, real-world connections between mathematical concepts and everyday applications. The lesson on volume captivated the class, allowing students to design scaled nets that transformed into rectangular 3D prisms aligned with their coordinate plane blueprints. My students were highly engaged and thoroughly enjoyed the hands-on learning experience.”