Five Educational Blogs

Five Blogs I am Following
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/

http://www.speedofcreativity.org/ http://polkadottedteacher.blogspot.com/

http://www.thethinkingstick.com/

http://www.edpolicythoughts.com/

Attributes of Geometric Solids

In class we did an interactive group learning activity with geometric shapes. There were five different stations set up around the room and there were groups of 4-5 people at each station, the groups were randomly selected by our professor. The first station that my group went to had you cut out shapes and then fold the paper into a 3D geometric shape. There were only four different shapes at this station, a pyramid, cube, tetrahedron, and an octahedron. We used these 3D models to fill out notecards we were given before we began this activity. Each notecard asked you to draw a picture, state the number of vertices, faces, edges and then to name the shapes of the faces of each figure. Having the physical shape in your hand made it easier to see each vertice, edge, and face, thus making it easier to fill out our notecards. I liked this activity because I am a hands on learner so building the shapes brought a lot of excitement and interest for me in this one station. We also had a couple of stations that we used iPads for the given activities. I liked that there was technology incorporated into the learning as well as low-tech learning.

Another activity that really stood out to me in this group learning was a station that had nine shapes that we were supposed to match to the correct name. We were then given a packet to fill out the number of vertices, faces, edges, types of shapes in the faces and then we were to provide an example of where we would see it in real life. This was, again, something that appealed to my love for hands on learning, because we were able to grab the shapes, move them to make filling out the chart and seeing the shapes a lot easier for me. I also really liked that it had us think of where we would see these different shapes in real life. It really made me think and realize that some of the shapes that seemed unusual when I first saw them aren't really that unusual.
https://illuminations.nctm.org/activity.aspx?id=3521
I am a sophomore in college, and I feel that this is an awesome type of group learning activity for any grade or age group.

How Can We Make These Shapes Congruent? Symmetry!

I find symmetry to be an interesting subject to learn about, it may be simple, but I enjoy it. One type of symmetry is line symmetry, a figure has line symmetry if it divides a figure into two congruent halves. For those who may not know, congruent means the same thing as equal, but when doing geometry the word conguent is used instead. In class we practiced line symmetry with four regular polygons, a triangle, square, pentagon, and a hexagon. When I was first drawing the lines of symmetry in these shapes I thought that the triangle only had one line of symmetry and was a little surprised to find out there are three lines of symmetry. I realized that I failed to rotate my paper to see the other two lines of symmetry, but as soon as I did rotate the paper I understood why there were three lines sof symmetry in the regualr triangle.

Another symmetry that we learned about was rotational symmetry. A figure has rotational symmetry when it is rotated 0 degrees and 360 degrees the resulting figure coincides with the original. The number of times you get and identical figure when rotating the figure is called the order. For this we cut out a square, trappezoid, and a rhombus, then we were given a piece of paper and 3 brads (or paper fasteners if you don't know them as brads) to attach the shapes to the given paper so that you can still rotate them. This helped to show that a trapezoid does not have any rotational symmetry because when you rotate it there is no point in the rotation when it is symmetrical to the original position. The square had order 4 rotational symmetry, meaning that at 4 points of the rotation the figure is symmetrical to the original figure. The rhombus was order 2 in rotational symmetry, similarly to the square, this means that when rotating the rhombus there were two times in the rotation that the rhombus was symmetrical to the original figure.

https://www.mathsisfun.com/geometry/symmetry.html

The following two pictures are showing the activities that we did with the lesson.