Castillero Middle Weekly Review (3/7/24)

STEM for Others Update at Castillero Middle

Hi Cobras! This week I came to 22 bright faces. Today was pretty routine. I worked on math with several students. Many were learning volume and surface area. Surprisingly, students struggled on completely opposite concepts. While some students easily grasped the idea of multiplying all of the sides to get the volume, those same students would struggle to figure out the surface area. On the other hand, some students were able to understand that surface area was just finding the area of each 2d side and adding them all up, yet they would ask me how to find the volume. My hypothesis is that these students were from two different classes and their teachers probably taught them the concepts differently so it was easier for them to figure out the volume than the surface area and vise versa. To solve this, I made sure that the students understood the differences between surface area and volume and then gave them easier ways to visualize the 3d shape to figure out the surface area.