Positive Blog 1 of 2

The other day a fellow Geometry teacher and I were frustrated about how boring the next few days that we had planned seemed. We thought there should be a more hands on and inquiry based way to teach the ratio and proportion lessons that were coming up. That night I started to get a very simple idea while walking Chuck. I asked God for help. (He's definitely answered this prayer before. He's even shown me things I had forgotten about from previous years on the day that I needed them.) I ended up cutting out some shapes and sleeping on my simple idea. I shared my idea with the other Geometry teacher and she really liked it. One of her strengths is finding ways to tweak activities to account for logistics or mistakes the kids might make. We came up with a pretty simple activity where each group of 3 students got a construction paper cut-out of a quadrilateral, a ruler, and a protractor. We had typed up very simple instructions. I didn't actually say any instructions. I just had the kids read them from the projector and follow them, and they did better at following directions than they ever have before. They just had to tract their shape and then draw a similar shape so that the ratio was 2:1. They had to think about keeping the angle measures the same while cutting each side length in half. It was nothing fancy, but it got them thinking about properties of similar figures which was the entire point of the lesson.

It was a success because of the awesome teachers that I work with and because God definitely had his hand in things. The kids also deserve credit for doing an awesome job of jumping right into the activity and thinking.