Description
What our LEGO®: Volume STEM lesson plan includes
Lesson Objectives and Overview: LEGO®: Volume STEM has students using LEGO® bricks to explore and calculate volume! Students will get to build models of volume using LEGO® bricks. This lesson is for students in 5th grade and 6th grade.
Classroom Procedure
Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the yellow box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand.
Teacher Notes
The paragraph on this page gives you a little more information on the lesson overall and describes what you may want to focus your teaching on. The blank lines are available for you to write out any thoughts or ideas you have as you prepare.
LEGO®: VOLUME STEM LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES
The LEGO®: Volume STEM lesson includes two content pages. Have you ever built a super tall LEGO® tower and thought, “This thing is huge!” Or have you made a LEGO® house and tried to fit mini-figures inside? Whether you’re building castles, spaceships, or cities, you’re not just having fun, you are using volume without even realizing it! Every time you stack bricks and shape your creations, you’re figuring out how much space they take up.
What Is Volume?
Volume is the measure of how much space something takes up. If you have ever asked yourself, “How much cereal can fit inside this box?” or “How many ice cubes would it take to fill this glass?” then you were thinking about volume.
If you can touch it, stack it, or build it—and it has length, width, and height—it has volume! Volume only applies to 3D shapes, objects with length, width, and height. We measure volume using cubic units, such as these:
○ Cubic centimeters (cm³)
○ Cubic inches (in³)
○ Cubic feet (ft³)
One cubic unit is a small cube that is 1 unit long × 1 unit wide × 1 unit tall. LEGO® bricks are more than just building blocks—they are perfect for exploring volume! A single 1×1×1 LEGO® brick with one stud represents 1 cubic unit, which is the standard way we measure the volume of solid figures.
When you stack LEGO® bricks to build a shape, you are creating rectangular prisms, and you can find its
volume in two ways.
1. Counting each individual cube
2. Using the volume formula: Volume = Length × Width × Height
If you built a LEGO® prism that is 5 units long, 2 units wide, 3 units high, you could count all the 1×1×1 bricks. Or you could simply multiply using the formula:
5 × 2 × 3 = 30 cubic units
For example, if you built a LEGO® house that’s 3 studs long, 2 studs wide, and 4 studs tall, what would the volume be? It would be 3 studs long (length), 2 studs wide (width), and 4 studs high (height). Using the volume formula it would be:
3 × 2 × 4 = 24 cubic units
Using LEGO® for Volume
Larger LEGO® bricks, like a 2×4 brick, can be thought of as made up of multiple cubic units, which shows how multiplication makes it quicker and easier to calculate volume. You might not always notice it, but you use volume in real life all the time! When you pack your backpack, you’re figuring out how much stuff will fit inside—that’s volume.
Pouring juice into a cup? You’re measuring how much liquid it can hold. When people move and stack boxes into a truck, they’re solving a real-life puzzle using volume to make everything fit. Architects use volume to design rooms, and scientists use it to measure how much of a substance they’re working with. Even when you’re building something with blocks or LEGO® bricks, you’re thinking about volume and space.
LEGO®: VOLUME STEM LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS
The LEGO®: Volume STEM lesson plan includes three worksheets: an activity worksheet, a practice worksheet, and a homework assignment. Each one will help students solidify their grasp of the material they learned throughout the lesson. You can refer to the classroom procedure guidelines to know when to hand out each worksheet.
LEGO® RECTANGULAR PRISMS ACTIVITY WORKSHEET
Using LEGO® bricks, students will build different rectangular prisms. Their mission is to count the bricks they used and record their shapes’ volume. They will then try to build two different prisms that have the same volume but that look different. After they do so, they will draw a picture of each one.
BUILD YOUR OWN STRUCTURE PRACTICE WORKSHEET
Students will get to build their own structure for the practice. It can be a house, a tower, a spaceship—anything they want. They must make sure their build uses bricks that stack neatly in rows/layers so that it’s easy to measure the volume.
VOLUME DETECTIVE HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
For the homework assignment, students will become volume detectives as they find four box-shaped objects around their house. They will measure the boxes using a ruler or measuring tape to figure out the length, width, and height of each object. Then they will use the volume formula to determine the volume of each box. At the end, they will answer three questions.
