Simple Ways to Transform Your Geometry Unit Part 2 (EP 36)

Simple Ways to Transform Your Geometry Unit (Part 2)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Elementary Math Chat!

If you remember last week, I mentioned that I’m trying to get 24 reviews on Apple podcasts by the 24th of the month. I wanted to play on the number 24 a little bit because it’s also 2024, and the 24th just happens to be my birthday. So, that’s kind of where this whole idea came from.

But of course, in order to reach this goal, I need a little help from you. And so, I want to read you guys this super sweet review I got today. I wish I could respond to these and tell you how much I appreciate them. But I know you’re listening, so I’m just going to read this one so you can hear how sweet this was.

This is from the username MMMLLL###, I love how everything’s tripled. They said I love your creations and your podcast. I’m finishing my third year teaching fourth grade math. Each podcast I listened to is right on pace with what skill I’m getting ready to teach. You share great ideas and new ways for me to teach. I now look to your resources first when I need something new. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. I hope you surpass your 24 goal.

Well, I hope I do too. And first of all, I am honored that you’re choosing my resources. So, thank you for that. And also thank you for taking the time to write such a genuine review. I appreciate it so much.

Today is part two of my episode where I am sharing my favorite teaching tips and activities for your geometry unit. Last week, I covered the first half of my geometry unit on lines, angles, and triangles. This week, I’ll cover the second half of my unit on classifying quadrilaterals, line symmetry, and patterns.

I think the perfect way to kick off this episode is with a little math joke, maybe two. Here’s the first one. Why was the quadrilateral late for school? It got on the wrong bus. Get it, rhombus? How cute is that? I know. Here’s another one on triangles I forgot to share last week. Why did the right triangle go to the beach? Because it was 90 degrees! Those are really fun to use as a lesson hook. So, there you go.

All right, well, let’s get started with the fourth lesson in my geometry unit, and this was on classifying quadrilaterals. I did spend two days on this lesson because there is just too much to cover in one day when it comes to quadrilaterals. On the first day, we focused mainly on the attributes of each quadrilateral, and then on the second day, we focused more on classifying quadrilaterals.

So, I’ll start with the first day. The lesson we used on this first day was from the website Better Lesson, and I’ll have this linked in the show notes for you. You might have to create a free account to access the lesson, but it is one of the best math lessons I have found on this website.

What I love about this lesson is it’s very student-centered. So, it’s not a teacher-led activity, and it also focuses on discovery through collaboration. They analyze with their peers. They discuss with their peers. They discover with their peers. I also love that they’re up and moving around the room. It is just a really well-thought-out and planned lesson, and it was perfect for our day one.

Now, my version is a bit different than the original. So, this is how I taught this lesson. Before the lesson, you’ll need to hang up the six posters of quadrilaterals. You can download these from their website, and you’ll just need to hang those around your room and spread them out because they’re going to be rotating through all those posters.

The posters each have three to five images of a specific quadrilateral. So, you’ll get a poster for quadrilaterals, trapezoids, parallelograms, rectangles, rhombuses, and squares. You’ll also want to put your students in six groups, one for each poster, and they’ll also need six sticky notes.

I gave each group a different color. But if you don’t have six different colors, just make sure they put their group number on the sticky note. So, there’s not a lot of prep. You just have to print and hang the posters, divide your kids up into six groups, and give them six sticky notes.

Once that’s all taken care of, then have your groups go and stand by a quadrilateral poster. They’ll end up rotating through all of them, so it doesn’t matter where they start. So, here’s how this quadrilateral lesson works.

Their job as a group is to write down one thing they notice about all of the quadrilaterals on the poster, so they’re looking for a common attribute. Let’s say they’re starting at the poster with rectangles. It says at the top, these are rectangles, and then underneath that, it asks what do they all have in common. So, as a group, they discuss and write down one common attribute on their sticky note and place it on the poster.

In the beginning, it’s really easy because they’re the first group there. So, they might notice they all have four sides, or they all have four right angles or parallel sides. Whatever they noticed they wrote down and put it on the poster. I recommend requiring students to take turns writing on sticky notes, and that will avoid any arguments about who gets to write, and it’ll also make sure that all students are participating.

So, after each group places their common attribute on the poster, they rotate to the next poster of quadrilaterals and repeat the same task. However, they cannot write down an attribute that has already been listed. So, this activity gets a little more challenging each time they arrive at a new quadrilateral poster. So, this means they have to analyze and discuss at a deeper level each time they rotate to a new poster.

Once they’ve rotated through all six set quadrilateral posters, they can go back to their seats, and then you’ll want to bring the posters to the front of the room so you can see what they wrote. I did make a recording sheet to go with this lesson, and I’ll make sure that’s linked in the show notes for you. I had my students glue this in their math notebooks to use as a reference throughout this unit.

So, we went through each poster and discussed what they wrote on their sticky notes, and then we checked off the attributes of each quadrilateral on the recording sheet.

We also highlighted the most specific name for each quadrilateral. So, even though a square has four right angles, like what a rectangle does, and it also has four equal sides like a rhombus, we highlighted the word square because that is its most specific name, and that’s where we ended day one.

I honestly think you could take this same lesson and apply it to any lesson on classifying objects, especially in fifth grade. When you classify triangles, you can have posters of isosceles, scalene, and equilateral, as well as acute, obtuse, and right, and you could adapt this whole activity and do it with triangles. It’s such a good lesson.

So, let’s get into day two. This was hands-down one of my favorite lessons to teach because my students got to participate in a quadrilateral fashion show. The first few times I hosted a fashion show, this was probably around 2004 or 2005, I put on a real fashion show, like I literally had them walking a runway. My classroom was at the very end of the school, so I didn’t have anybody across the hall from me. So, I had this whole hallway that I turned into a runway.

Their group was in charge of researching a quadrilateral and presenting it to the class during a fashion show, and the outfits they were wearing had to be the quadrilateral they were presenting. They could carry it as a purse. They could wear it as a hat. They could make it go over their head like it was their shirt. They got to be really creative with it, but they had to wear it when they were modeling.

We had to get creative back in the days when we didn’t have technology to rely on, and this was such a fun lesson. But you know, it did take a few days for them to research and create their quadrilaterals and then present it to the class. So, I ended up turning this idea into a PowerPoint presentation instead, and that way, I was able to fit it into one class period.

It was still a fashion show, so I didn’t throw the idea out altogether. But now my models are these adorable dot dudes, and they really make the fashion show what it is. You can’t help but smile when you see them. And by the way, this fashion show PowerPoint is in my TPT store, and I will have that linked in the show notes.

So, the PowerPoint goes through one quadrilateral at a time, and my dot dudes come out wearing the quadrilateral. For example, one dot dude comes out holding a parallelogram, and the slide says, “Meet Polly. Polly is modeling a four-sided figure with two sets of parallel sides. What is the best name for this figure? So, I’ve worded it the same way that you would speak when someone’s modeling in a fashion show.

They do have a recording sheet that goes along with the fashion show, and there’s a place at the top for them to name the figure. So, they would write parallelogram. There’s also a place for them to draw and label a parallelogram. The PowerPoint actually teaches them how to label the parallel lines and the arrows to show that they’re parallel. It does this for right angles and equal sides as well.

So, they name the figure, they draw the figure, and then on the side of the recording sheet, there’s a list of all six quadrilaterals, and they each have their own little checkbox. So, they go through and classify the parallelogram in as many ways as possible.

Now some of this will depend on what definition you use for a trapezoid. I always taught that inclusive definition where it was at least one set of parallel sides. But you can do this as well if you teach the exclusive definition, exactly one pair of parallel sides. This PowerPoint is editable, so you can make any of those changes.

So, going back to the parallelogram example. It would have a checkmark for quadrilateral, trapezoid, and parallelogram. So, this goes much deeper than the previous lesson did since they are classified in more than one way. Some fourth grade teachers don’t go into this hierarchy. I know fifth grade for sure does, but we ended up teaching it. I just think it helps them gain a deeper understanding of quadrilaterals, and these types of questions were on our test.

This recording sheet also went in their notebooks along with the checklist from the previous lesson. So, they had two really good reference sheets to help them when it came to classifying quadrilaterals.

So, that takes care of classifying quadrilaterals. Let’s move on to the fifth lesson in my geometry unit, and this one was on symmetry. Symmetry is pretty easy for them, but the main struggle they have is not being able to visualize some of the more challenging lines of symmetry, like the diagonals.

So, I printed off a few larger shapes so I could show these folds in action, and they could even come up and fold it as well. This is especially important for shapes that are often confused with having line symmetry, like parallelograms, and the letter Z, or for shapes that have both vertical and horizontal symmetry, but not diagonal, like an oval or the letter X.

I pretty much taught out of the book for this one, and again, I just had shapes available to fold throughout the lesson if they were struggling to visualize the line symmetry.

I will share what I did for small groups that day because it worked really well. I had them do a symmetry sort with the letters of the alphabet, and they sorted them into four categories: zero lines of symmetry, one line of symmetry, two lines of symmetry, and more than two lines of symmetry.

They did this with a partner, and so that meant I only had to make three sets of the letters. I actually made an extra set just in case I lost a letter, or one got torn because they are folding them. So, I would recommend having an extra set just in case.

The letters were made of construction paper, so they were easy to fold, and I cut these out using the die-cut machine. That did take a little prep, but it was helpful for them to be able to fold the letters, so see if maybe a TA can help you with that one, or even a parent volunteer.

But if you want something a little less prep, you could do the same activity, but instead, just print a page that has all the letters of the alphabet on it, and they could draw the lines of symmetry instead of sorting them. Although, they could still do a sort. But they would have to write the letters in the category instead of sorting them. I think both will work.

Now, something else you may not have considered is that if you have small rectangular mirrors, they can use those to check for line symmetry. It’s actually really neat the way it works. So, if you are not cutting out the letters for them to fold, you could use the mirrors instead. And again, if you don’t have any, check around because I know for me, we had a whole set of these that came in our science kit to use for a lesson on reflection. So, I bet if you ask around, there are some other teachers that have them.

You can also get these for a pretty good price on Amazon, and they are plastic so if the mirrors fall on the ground, you don’t have to worry about them breaking. I’ll have that link in the show notes if you want to check those out.

Another option for a small group activity doesn’t involve alphabet letters, but it’s still a really good one, and it’s the sort and solve that I talked about last week. The quadrilateral sorts have a symmetry set included, and again, it’s only $2.50 for six different sorts. So, that’s another option for small groups.

That’s really all I have for symmetry. Again, those lessons are pretty cut and dry. I just helped them with visualizing the folds and having those mirrors available to check.

The sixth and final lesson in my geometry unit was on patterns, specifically shaped patterns. I talked about this lesson back in episode 26 on unifix cubes, and I admitted to you that I used to dread this lesson. But that was until I started teaching it with unifix cubes.

For my whole group lesson, I had a set of growing pattern task cards, and each task card showed the first three or four figures and a pattern. The figures are made with unifix cubes, and I had my students build the next figure in the pattern. Once they had their figure built, then I had them write a number pattern to match as a way to check their answer.

So, if they noticed that the first figure had six unifix cubes, the second one had nine, and the third one had 12, the figure they built should have 15, and the rule was to add three. We then extended the pattern and found how many would be in the eighth or the 10th. They didn’t have enough to build this figure, but it was a good extension to continue the pattern.

This was so much more engaging for them rather than analyzing shapes in a workbook page. So, if you also dread teaching this lesson on shape patterns, try it with unifix cubes instead. I will definitely have the unifix cubes task cards linked in the show notes for you.

My final geometry tip today is for a small group review activity if you have a set of geoboards. If you don’t have geoboards, I would ask around because I’m sure some teachers in your building have some that they can lend you just for one day.

For this activity, they each had a geoboard along with a small handful of rubber bands, I’d say five or six. They don’t need a lot of them for this activity. Their job was to build the geometric figure I was describing through my geometry riddles.

For example, my riddle might say I have four equal sides, but zero right angles. What shape am I? They would build a rhombus. Another one was, I am a three-sided figure with an obtuse angle. What shape am I? So, they would build an obtuse triangle.

Riddles are pretty simple to make. You just have to include the attributes in your riddle. You can do this with types of lines, types of angles, triangles, and quadrilaterals. Pair this with the geoboard and they are a really fun review activity.

So, those are my favorite teaching tips and activities from my geometry unit. I hope I’ve inspired you to try something new and remember, all of the resources I mentioned are linked in the show notes.

All right let’s go ahead and get to today’s teaching tip of the week, and this one is also related to geometry. This one is a fun extension activity whenever your students come to your table when you already have geoboards and rubber bands there.

Let’s say you just finished the geometry riddles I talked about earlier. Before they leave and go back to their table, have them create a design on their geoboard using all right triangles. The triangles will overlap with each other, so they’ll end up creating a lot more right triangles than they started with. For example, they might start by making three right triangles, but they end up having five in the end.

So, have them make their simple design and then have them count how many right triangles are in their design. They’re going to want to put this number on a sticky note and place it under the geoboard, and here’s the really fun part.

The next person that comes to your table and sits at their seat will try to figure out how many right triangles are in their design. When they think they know the number, they can check the sticky note that’s under the geoboard to see if they’re correct. So, this is a really fun way to start your activity with geoboards and end it as well.

All right, well, that is all for today’s episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Have a great week, and I will see you next Tuesday.