Geometry Here, Geometry There! Geometry, Geometry EVERYWHERE!

Happy Friday!! I hope everyone had a great week. For our fellow Southern California bloggers- we are sorry that we cannot make the meet up this weekend. We are participating in a breast cancer walk tomorrow.

 I think geometry is one of my favorite sections in math to teach, mostly because it lends itself to many different hands-on activities. You may have read about some of my geometry activities from last school year, but if not, you can check them out by clicking here. Today, I bring you some new ideas that I used when I taught third grade.

 I love incorporating movement into my lessons as much as possible. I believe that getting students up and out of their seats delivers oxygen to the brain and keeps them focused and engaged in the lesson. One way that I reinforced polygons, lines, and angles was through a simple activity where I had my students work in pairs to create shapes or figures with their bodies. Sometimes I would call out different shape attributes that I was looking for and the students would be given a short amount of time to put themselves in position. My class loved this activity and thought they were taking a "brain break" rather than learning math. I took pictures of each group in their positions.

The following day,  the students were given the pictures and used markers to highlight and identify various angles, lines, and shapes within their picture. It was a great way to get them to use the geometry terms and reinforce these concepts without using a worksheet.

I also did another geometry activity using pictures of famous world monuments.

During our language arts block, my students and I enjoyed the story Ben's Dream by Chris Van Allsburg.

 In this story, a boy has a dream that he floats by many different world monuments.
This triggered an idea to use the theme from this book as a geometry lesson. Why not find pictures of the monuments mentioned in this book and have the students look for examples of polygons, solid figures, angles, and lines?!? I hopped onto google, printed the pictures, and slid them into page protectors. I paired up my students and had them use a dry-erase marker to highlight the various shapes, angles, lines, etc.

I placed the pictures around the room and the students "traveled" from picture to picture and recorded their findings using the chart below. Using the whiteboard marker made it easy to quickly erase their marks so that the next pair of students could have a turn identifying geometric figures. The font used in the chart came from Miss Kindergarten.

What fun ideas do you have when teaching geometry?

Geometry in Our World