Quadrilaterals: Properties of Parallelograms

Today was just one of those "GREAT" teaching days. I had so much planned for my students and I really wanted them to conquer the properties of parallelograms. I used two different types of colored paper (purple and lime green) to make my flipbook because I want students to see the relationship between parallelograms, rectangles,  rhombi, and squares. This worked out great because I didn't even tell the students that they all had properties in common, they asked me if they were related because they were in the "same color." :)

I started with the vocabulary page first because many of my students accommodations include "front-load vocabulary". Frontloading vocabulary is powerful for my special education & ELL students because I can help them learn the meaning of new words and strengthen their independent skills for constructing meaning from text.

After the vocabulary section, I started with the five properties of parallelograms. I pulled out my whiteboards and had students make 3 columns (Property, Picture, and how to solve). This turned out better than expected because all of my students referenced their whiteboards throughout the entire class.

After we made this chart, we started on the three parallelogram example problems. I told them they have 3 minutes to discuss with their group which property we are going to use to solve each example. There were some great discussions going on and I overheard students using the vocabulary we just went over. In the previous years, I had students just say "it's property 4 because the angles are not across from each other." Today, I heard "we are going to use property 4 because consecutive angles are always supplementary". (insert proud teacher face here). After three minutes were up, I called on each group to tell me what property we are going to use to solve the problem and that they had to walk me through how to set the equation up. I did this for every example and it made the lesson "student-centered" since the students had total control of the classroom! My co-teacher likes to color code the angles to help students solve for missing angles. For example, he likes to color a pair of opposite angles in blue and the other pair in pink. This helps many students to determine whether they are equal because "same colors are equal" and "different colors are supplementary."

After the notes, I had students work on the following Parallelograms Maze (which they LOVED). Directions: Every student will start at problem A and solve the problem. When they solve the problem, they will take the solution and plug it into B's empty box. They will repeat this process until they are finished with all of the problems. I walk around and check students work because if they mess up on a problem, it will make their whole worksheet incorrect. By creating this worksheet, students definitely asked more questions than usual just to make sure that they are not doing a lot of work to get the whole paper wrong. I did have students write down which property they used for every problem.

Overall it was a great day! I love it when students have questions and when they use important geometry vocabulary in their conversations :) Tomorrow we have a Parallelograms Quiz and I'm very excited to see how they do. 

UPDATE TO POST: I have started making YouTube Videos with Google Form Assessments in the description if you would like to use!

Here are the resources I used today:

1) Flipbook: CLICK HERE

2) Parallelograms Maze: CLICK HERE

3) YouTube Video - Given Two Sides