Cliff Palace, in Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado, is the largest cliff dwelling in North America. Ancestral Puebloan people built it in a sandstone alcove from about 1190 to 1260 CE, with about 150 rooms and 23 kivas, round rooms set into the ground. About 100 people lived there, and by about 1300 they had moved south. Their descendants are today's Pueblo peoples, among them the Hopi, Zuni and the Rio Grande pueblos; the park counts 26 Tribes and Pueblos with ties to Mesa Verde. The figures on these pages come from the National Park Service. The cube buildings and floor plans are math models, not plans of real rooms.
Five pages of 3rd and 4th grade geometry, each starting with a short panel. Page 1 counts the rooms in six buildings of unit cubes. Page 2 counts the rooms in one layer of a room block and the layers, then multiplies. Page 3 shades the squares each building shows from the top, the front and the side. Page 4 finds the area and perimeter of six floor plans on grid paper. Page 5 names the shaded part of four kivas split into six equal parts, as a fraction and in degrees, then four stories with Cliff Palace's numbers. The first problem on each page is a worked example.
Build page 1's and page 3's buildings with snap cubes first, then look at them from the top, the front and the side. On page 5, the degrees are for 4th grade; 3rd grade can stop at the fractions.
Stack blocks into a building and ask how many blocks are hidden from view, then count them by layers.
This pack supports the following Common Core State Standards for Mathematics:
© Copyright 2010. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved.
Geometry from Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde, the great cliff dwelling Ancestral Puebloan people built of sandstone, with its stacked rooms and round kivas. Students count rooms as unit cubes, find rooms by layers, shade top, front and side views, measure floor plans, and split kivas into equal parts.
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