Geometry and Spatial Sense

I know I said that I loved last week's math lesson (and that's still true!) BUT I loved this week's math lesson even more, because it is the strand that I am most familiar with AND is probably my strongest strand. Geometry makes me happy! I understand shapes, and I understand what to do with them, and how to analyze them! I am a visual learner, and person in general, and this lesson helped me to come up with different strategies to teach my future students geometry. So here's a recap of what went down...

First, we started with a very informative lesson that included toothpick and yummy marshmallows. Our table groups were asked to make 3D shapes, and then we all walked around to see what others had created. I found this to be a great "minds-on" activity, and definitely captured everyone's attention. (Who doesn't like food!?)

My Square-based Pyramid (Personal Collection).

Next, we moved on to a problem-solving activity called "What's my Shape?". In this activity, we were given the number of sides and the number of shapes, and had to come up with what we thought the answers were. The nice thing about this activity is that there could be multiple different answers for the same questions (the fun part was figuring it out!). I really love this activity, as it promotes collaboration among peers, and use students' prior knowledge to help them figure out the answers.

"What's my Shape?" (Personal Collection).

After this activity, we watched James Blunt sing "My Triangle" to the tune of his song "You're Beautiful". I found this video extremely entertaining, and pretty informative when it comes to explaining triangles. Being a music major, I think that by including music into math (and well, anything, really) it is a great way to get students engaged and involved in a lesson, especially if the music is familiar to them.

The next activity we worked on was our "Downtown". In this activity, we were asked to draw a city, and had to include specific shapes that were outlined on the paper we were given. This task is great, because it helps students to visualize 2D shapes, and even helps a little bit with organization, too!

Geometocity (Personal Collection).

We then moved on to teaching geometry through games. Some games that we played with and discussed were Battleship, Dragon Box Elements, Guess my Shape, and Tangrams. To play Battleship, we split our table groups into partners, and drew our own battleship boards. It was the standard game of Battleship, but still fun to play from a geometry point of view, as it helped us to visualize and plot the shapes. Dragon Box Elements is similar to Dragon Box from previous lessons, and helps students to work with shapes, and solve problems through gamification. (Students are learning without even knowing that they are!). Guess my Shape is pretty much the same as Guess Who, except with shapes. Again, our table separated in pairs, one pair chose an envelope with a shape in it, and the other pair had to guess what the shape was by looking at many shapes on the table, and by asking yes or no questions. 

Guess my Shape! (Personal Collection).

One of my favourite things that we worked on, and one of my favourite things from elementary school, were tangrams. Tangrams are outlines of shapes that are made by putting multiple shapes together. As I mentioned before, geometry really works for me, and so do tangrams, as I am able to visualize which shape goes where.

Cat Tangram (Personal Collection).

Before I wrap up my post, I just want to mention the online game that I played this week, and that is the Isometric Drawing Tool. Again, as a visual learner, I really felt that this tool helped me to map out different shapes, and helped me to learn how to rotate/transform them, whether they were 2D or 3D. I would definitely try to use this resource in my own class, and I feel it does help all of the visual and spatial learners out there! 

Like I started my post with, I loved this lesson. I felt that I was extremely engaged, and even wanted to learn more ways of how to teach my students about geometry. I had a lot of fun collaborating with my table group, and plan to use activities and groups like this to help further my own students' learning in the future.

Until next week, Happy Math-ing!