All Middle School (MS) Math classrooms were certainly buzzing as the students solved creative math problems to celebrate this year’s World Bee Day the week of May 20. MS Math Department Head and Teacher Katie Adams created age-appropriate bee-themed math problems for each grade to explore.
In Class 4, the girls identified various geometric shapes, discussed their attributes, worked on calculating perimeter and discovered tessellation. To better understand real world applications, the students were tasked with determining which shape would hold the most honey for a bee hive. In groups of three, they were given one of these four shapes to work with: triangle, trapezoid, hexagon or parallelogram.
Together the girls figured out how their shapes fit with one another to make a tessellation and then calculated their perimeter (counting all insides inside and out!) to find how much wax it would take to build a honeycomb with their shapes.
In the 5th grade classrooms, capacity and measurement were the students’ focus. Their activities required the mathematicians to think about honey production and storage in grams. Using hexagonal weights, each small group worked together to figure out what combination of these shapes were needed to hold varying amounts of honey. In the end, they needed to design their own hive holding between 250g and 300g.
Class 6 explored volume of composite figures through honeycomb engineering. Their goal was to calculate and build honeycomb models that could store the greatest volume of honey using the least amount of wax possible. They were provided a set of 21 shapes ranging from hexagon, trapezoid, triangle to parallelogram. After constructing their prototypes, the groups calculated the composite volume of their honeycombs.
The seventh graders embarked on a mission to solve the case of the missing Royal Jelly! Class 7’s lesson emphasized the use of scientific notation and working with large numbers in equations. Just like a game of Clue, the students moved around the classroom working in pairs to solve a set of clues and eliminate suspects, locations and methods using their math skills. As they solved an equation, the answer correlated to another clue. By the end of class, the students had determined that it was Scout Sunny in the Wax Workshop with a honey spill — an accident after all!
Each grade also took time to recognize the genius of bees and their spectacular hives. A natural wonder, their systematic hives are a great example of geometric engineering. The students also learned about bees’ vital importance to our global ecosystem, including agriculture. They discovered some bee fun facts at the conclusion of their math packets, as well. Did you know that about one out of every three bites of the food you eat depends on pollinators like bees? Or that the bees who collect nectar and build the hive are all female worker bees? Incredible!
