This week in math, fifth graders have been learning about how to find the volume of rectangular prisms.  We have built prisms with cubes, designed prisms on paper, played games with prisms, and used formulas to find the volume of various sized prisms.  We have extended our vocabulary to talk about prisms by learning about length/width/height, bases, layers, perpendicular sides, faces, and cubic units. We have also used the opportunity to review strategies for easily multiplying 3 numbers, the associative property of multiplication, and order of operations. Next week, we will apply this knowledge to finding the volume of irregularly shaped solids and considering real-world uses of finding the volume of rectangular spaces.