6th Grade Willy Wonka Geometry Unit (Common Core Standards)

This Geometry Unit is compiled of four 6th grade mathematics lessons that are all based on Common Core Standards and are all very problem-based. The theme of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is used for this entire unit, which allows students to remain interested and engaged in this highly interactive, week-long geometry unit. The first lesson has students work with composing and decomposing shapes to find and compare area. Students are challenged to find the dimensions of lickable wallpaper needed in order to cover a wall in Willy Wonkas chocolate factory. Tangrams are used to make comparisons between rectangles and triangles, which will then transfer into determining the areas of lickable wallpaper needed to cover each section. Students will then create and decorate their own wall of lickable wallpaper using the dimensions found.The second lesson in this unit allows students to discover and grow familiar with the volume formula, which they encounter through an inquiry process. Students will act as CEO of the chocolate factory to make business decisions about how to efficiently package everlasting gobstoppers using certain restrictions. A SmartBoard lesson on volume will then follow, covering units of measurement, relating volume to real world instances, and providing several example problems using various three-dimensional objects. The third lesson incorporates the concepts of a coordinate grid in order to draw polygons and determine the length between each of the vertices. The problem asks students to help Charlie complete Willy Wonkas final challenge by quickly finding each of the troublesome children throughout the factory to send them out before he is able to ride in the glass Wonkavator. On a class set of laptops, students help Charlie by plotting coordinate points of the locations of the children in the various rooms of the factory. They will make discoveries about distance between points as they map Charlies route. Only one pair of students will create a route that has a golden ticket and they will have the opportunity to use this ticket during the post-assessment review game. The fourth and final lesson to this unit teaches the idea of discovering and classifying nets to model three-dimensional geometric objects, such as cubes. After students create various nets, they will describe the common characteristics these nets share, including how many squares each net has, the possible arrangements of the squares, and how they know that there are no more feasible nets for a cube. This lesson also briefly introduces the idea of calculating a cubes surface area and the formula used to compute this.