Areas, volumes, and dimensions

This has been the week of finding areas. Renata's been working with the kids on finding the areas of funny shapes by decomposing them into rectangles and triangles and squares. I decided to approach areas from the point of view of units and dimension. If a square has side length 1 ft, what's the area of the square in square inches? Most of the kids said 144 very quickly, which made me happy (having had lots of college students who would have said 12). Then we went to volume, finding volumes in cubic feet and cubic inches.

Today we had a little time left at the end for more fun stuff, so we drew 4-dimensional cubes (and, in the case of one of the kids, a 3-dimensional pair of pants!).