Hi fellow bloggers! This week in my Math Teaching course was round 2 of math presentations. Four of my peers went up one by one to present on a math activity that they would do in a Grade 9 Math classroom. All of the presentations were excellent, and I found myself taking notes, so that I could try these in my Math placement. However, there is one activity in particular that I would like to focus on for today's blog. The topic was Grade 9 Geometry and the students would be learning about how to find the sum of the interior angles in any shape ranging from a triange (3 sided figure) to a myriagon (10,000 sides)!
In order to help students figure out an equation to solve for the sum of the interior angles, there was a guiding example that helped students make the connection! The teacher (Mr. F) would ask the class to draw any triangle that they wanted; it could be as small or as a big as they would like. The next step would be to figure out where the interior angles were on their triangles. When they found these as a class, he would instruct them to draw the angles in. They would then take a pair of scissors and cut out the triangle, before cutting out the interior angles. The key to this example is the interior angles. When the students have their 3 interior angles, they need to find a way to fit them together to make a semi-circle. Mr. F would guide them by asking what shape they just made; when they understood the shape, he would ask them to pull out their protractors and measure the angle of the semi-circle. It was 180 degrees! Even though each student drew a different triangle, they were still able to get the same result, which proves that the sum of the interior angles of any triangle will always equal 180 degrees. How cool!
Once the students had this knowledge, he passed out a guiding worksheet for the students to work on individually or in pairs. Even though it was an inquiry based worksheet that helped students to explore how to find the sum of the interior angles for any shape, it also provided some guidance to ground student thinking. It instructed students to try to make the smallest number of triangles from a single point A to any other vertex in the shape! I thought that this was a great way to keep students on track, yet keep it open enough so that they could experiment and try different things before coming to a solution. Finally, the students would have to fill in a chart to identify the relationship between the number of sides of a shape and the smallest number of triangles that they could draw inside of it. Overall, this was an outstanding activity!
I think that students from any stream (academic, applied, and possibly essential) could complete this activity because while it was geared towards students exploring and playing around with an abstract concept, it was also concrete in its guiding questions and semi-circle example. Students would be able to make the connections between the sum of the interior angles of a circle, the number of sides of a shape, and the number of triangles inside the shape. If students needed any more guidance, the teacher could provide one-on-one support, or more guiding questions, to help scaffold student learning. I will definitely try this in my class!
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