I love Geometry: especially a little further in the year when you have covered enough topics to make things FUN and INTERESTING.
Last year was the first year I taught this lesson and I blogged about it here. The gist of it is a fictional merry-go-round that is brought to our school to have the carpentry shop repair and repaint. My superintendent came in and went along with me on this. The kids were very into accurately calculating the area, amount of paint, and total cost of the hexagonal merry-go-round.
The only info they were given was that it was a regular hexagon and the side measure.
What was fun was the many different ways students came up with the length of the "apothem".
I never introduced that word and these students had never calculated the area of a regular polygon. My goal was to ensure they had strategies that would work for them during the state test and I knew there was NO way any of them would remember one more area formula!!
Some used the Pythagorean theorem because they realized by angle measures the triangles were equilateral. Some used special right triangles. And at least two ended up using trig!!
Here are links to everything I used. Not all kids got all documents. I scaffolded as needed since I have a number of students on IEPs.
Student Sheet
Student Help Sheet
Unit Plan
Rubric
Smartboard slides
