Thursday, September 30, 2010

(G) Geometry

Chapter 20 speaks about geometric thinking and geometric concepts. This ties in with the lesson we had dealing with geometry, shapes, and angles. We were asked to find the angles in a pentagon ( a five sided figure) :


Honestly, when I was first faced with the pentagon, and the thought of finding the interior angles, I was stumped.How...?!?! Wait, Why?!?!

What struck me when everyone was sharing their answers and thoughts was how there were many ways in which my classmates choose to find the angles. I was reminded of this when reading Chapter 20. The book states that spatial sense and geometric reasoning is one of the two related frameworks of geometry objectives. Spatial sense is defined as an intuition about shapes and their relationships. This includes the ability to mentally visualize objects and spacial relationships.


This, I realized is what my classmates had done. They had each "turned" the shape around in their mind, and looked for other shapes within the pentagon to help them in finding the sum of the interior angles. Anyone and everyone when consistently provided with shape and spatial relationships over time, can develop spatial sense!

Another thing that has stuck with me all this while about that particular lesson was how children tend to construe a lopsided square as a diamond. I showed the children in my class the same shape and sure enough more than half of them proudly said that it was a diamond. I also realised that the book we used for our Math curriculum did not depict squares as anything other than in the traditional way.

After explaining to them and using concrete materials to show them, i redid the activity with them a week later. This time, however, they all said that it was a square and when asked why they felt this was so, one of my girls replied "of, course it's a square because all the sides are the same still. Teacher Grace, you just put it another way. It is still a square!" Teacher Grace's reaction.....*a great sense of achievement*!! =D
HOW MANY SQUARES DO YOU SEE?

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