'Tis The Season for Family in Math Workshop!

This week, we have been learning about the many members of the polygon family! Like a real family, all polygons share certain traits: flat, closed, made of line segments, do not cross themselves. Specifically, we’ve been looking at triangles (any polygon with 3 sides…equilateral, isosceles, scalene, acute, right, obtuse) and quadrilaterals (any polygon with 4 sides…trapezoid, parallelogram, rectangle, rhombus, square).

On our scavenger hunt, students were on the lookout for triangles around the school! We stopped to measure a few to describe them by their sides (equilateral, isosceles, scalene).

We also learned that the sides of a paper are perpendicular/form a right angle and have been using this to help us tell if an angle is right (lines up exactly with both edges of the paper), acute (lines up with one side of the paper/one side of the angle goes on the inside of the paper), or obtuse (lines up with one side of the paper/one side of the angle goes past the other edge of the paper). Here we are using this trick to try to describe this triangle by its angles (figure out if it is a right triangle, acute triangle, or obtuse triangle)!

Gingerbread Geometry...sneak peek!

This week, we started a new unit, two-dimensional geometry! I decided to incorporate this into a holiday art project. The students started making pieces they will use to create a gingerbread house landscape. We used the pieces we made this week to learn about points, lines, line segments, and to model intersecting, parallel, and perpendicular. We will "keep building" next week as I introduce rays, angles (acute, right, obtuse), and polygons. (Yes, your child is still in third grade and not middle school :-))

Student leaders picked one of the concepts we're learning (intersecting, perpendicular, or parallel), showed their classmates what they chose, and checked their peers' models.