Worldly Wednesday - Pyramids of Egypt

We recently traveled to Egypt with Global Encounter and learned about the Pyramids of Giza. I'm not sure what it is but the pyramids are so intriguing for my students. After talking about the location of Giza and what the pyramids were, we talked about how we thought they may have been built. In order to integrate math vocabulary into the lesson, we built pyramids using base ten cubes. We talked about the base of a pyramid being a square and then decided what our base would be. After we decided to have a base of 6x6, we talked about how this looks like a multiplication problem. We then constructed our base and realized that there were 36 squares in our base, the product of 6x6. I then introduced the word array and how this was a multiplication picture. The students discussed how this was an array and what our next arrays needed to be to make the shape of the pyramids. Because this activity was tied to something the students found interesting, they will remember the word array. They made a meaningful connection and it was exciting to watch them learn as they worked. If you would like to know more about Global Encounter and how you can virtually travel the world with your students, please feel free to contact me.