Welcome Back + New Unit

Firstly, welcome back from your time off. I hope you all had a great few weeks off and are feeling rested and ready to go for your last ever term of high school.

We have now started a new unit on space and measurement. This will involve finding the surface area and volume of shapes and prisms. We will start with more basic shapes and then move up to harder problems involving more complex shapes.

The first thing we need to understand is how to find the area of basic shapes. The details for this can be found in the following table:

This is a handy table that gives formulas for finding surface areas of basic shapes. We can use these when we find surface areas of more complex 3D shapes. For example, if we were asked to find the surface area of this shape:

Finding the surface area involves simply finding the area of each face, then adding all of these together to find the total surface area. We can easily find the surface area of each of the faces of this prism, as they are all rectangles. If we look at the table above, we know that the area of a rectangle is:

A = l x w 

We can apply this formula to all of the faces of this shape, then simply add all of the faces together. 

We can also apply the same ideas to different prisms, such as this one: 

This is a prism made of two triangular faces and 3 rectangular faces. If we use the formulas from the table above, we can easily find the areas of all of these faces. We can simply add all of these faces together and get the total surface area of this prism. 

This is a brief introduction to the unit, and more specifically how we find surface area of shapes. I have put a word document that has the table above in it in the "In Class Information" tab. 

If you have any questions from this feel free to comment on this post, or email or chat to me in person,