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Thursday, March 17, 2016

Area of Regular Polygons

So, I re-vamped my mini unit over area of regular polygons from last year and I definitely saw some improvement in scores. I think next year, we decided as a team that we are going to include area of regular polygons into our area and perimeter unit.  

Day 1: We labeled the parts of regular triangles on our regular polygons graphic organizer. 

After the graphic organizer, I had students mark the angles of regular triangles on the front of their foldable. 

Once we labeled the front of the foldable, we only completed 2 examples of finding the area of regular triangles. Looking back now, maybe "less is more" when introducing new topics. 



 After the 2 examples over regular triangles, students completed the Area of Regular Triangles Partner WS. I have been creating more of these worksheets because students prefer partner activities more than any other worksheet I give them. Each person completes a separate column from their partner and will both receive the same answer if they solved the problem correctly. There is a lot of discussion going on during partner worksheets because they go over both columns to see where they made a mistake (if they both get different answers).

Day 2: I had students open their notebook up to the graphic organizer and we labeled the parts of regular quadrilaterals and regular hexagons. I decided to do two sections today since they did so well yesterday. Again, it was a success and some of my students decided against using A = 1/2Pa to find the area of a regular quadrilateral. They realized once they found the length of each side, they could just use A = s².

Day 3: Today was a Scavenger Hunt sort of day and I had students break up into groups of 2-3 and start at a station. I printed these out and hung them up outside of my classroom to get students moving. Scavenger hunts are great for students to self-check their work because if they do not see their answer on another poster, then they made a mistake in their work. Do any other teachers receive a lot of groans and moans about scavenger hunts? About half of my students do NOT like getting up out of their seat and doing scavenger hunts. I wonder if its because a lot of teachers from different subjects are now starting to implement these into their lessons? 




Day 4: I reserved the computer lab for students to log-on to b.socrative.com and take an online practice quiz. I actually took the scavenger hunt from yesterday and made it into a quiz and not a single student noticed that I did this :).  I chose the Student Navigation option and had students take their time to navigate through the quiz. I told them before they press finish, come see me so I can check their work. If you press "Live Results", you can see what each problem the student missed/got correct. Overall, day 4 was pretty awesome because my students like going to the computer lab. If you would like to use the quiz, SOC-21128839




Please leave feedback if any of these lessons went well/didn't go well in your classroom so I can see what I need to re-vamp again for next year. Thanks!

Here are the files that I used for my unit over area of regular polygons:
Area of Regular Polygons Foldable: Click Here
Area of Regular Polygons Scavenger Hunt: Click Here





6 comments:

  1. O.M.G. This looks such a fantastic way to introduce and even re-teach area of regular polygons. Way to go!!!
    Mrs. Giselle Vargas
    Conniston Middle School
    West Palm Beach, Florida

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    Replies
    1. Thank you! My students normally do very well with this topic :)

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  2. I couldn't find the Socrative quiz you shared the code for.

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  3. How do you find your quiz on Socrative?

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  4. My students loved the scavenger hunt until they ran into a problem. One of the problems solutions is 36sqrt3. The only one left for it to match to has 54sqrt3 located in the upper left corner. Is there a corrected version? Thank you

    ReplyDelete