In Blantant Disregard for the Healthy Eating Policy

To wrap up a topic on surface area and volume, I wanted to do something really exciting, and investigatory. It's not a topic that lends itself to that so much, as most of it is learning to correctly follow formulae (at the early KS3 level). I'd read Fawn Nguyen's post on doughnuts as great vehicles for this, and it seemed too fantastic an opportunity to miss. I messed with the lesson a bit, talking about models with the kids first (a cylinder inside a cylinder, or one long, bent cylinder?) and helping the weakest ones out with some of the rules they'd forgotten, but otherwise it was mostly the same.

The one thing the kids did differently to Fawn's, though, was that almost all of them wrote their calculations on the large sheet of paper I'd put the doughnut on. The drew lines by the doughnut and labelled them with measurements, and wrote their workings around them. I had a 'no touching the doughnut' rule, and they were really good at that, so the doughnuts stayed fixed until their estimates had been approved. They had to justify their estimates as well - I don't know it Fawn's kids had to do that.

The sheets looked really awesome by the end and they all took photos. I wish I'd got some, they'd be great for my display boards though I'm sure they'd make the other kids jealous! We did this 2 weeks ago, and already it is a legend around the school: 'The maths lesson that had doughnuts in!' I think that says something sad about maths lessons, mine and everyone else's. Clearly we can't reach doughnut-eating heights of kid enjoyment every lesson, but we should at least be trying to compete with that on a regular basis. It shouldn't be an event so massively out of the ordinary that everyone in school has now heard of it. So, what's as awesome as doughnuts?