'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)!