coordinate proof

Day 95: starting coordinate proof project

Lisa Bejarano 180 Days of Geometry 13-14 ,

Sometimes the super awesome project based activities aren’t enough and we just need to practice a few skills over and over. I know this isn’t really cool, and it isn’t even really a project, but it is necessary. I think it is the time of year, or maybe its me. Regardless.they are completing a bunch of problems where they are given 4 coordinates and they have to construct a proof.

Planing Hexter 4 (or the first 6 weeks of 2nd semester), or, Hey! Kate Nowak, this is why blogging kicks ass!

Lisa Bejarano Curriculum & Learning Targets, Geometry , , ,

Waayyy too much time and thought went into this! I have to remind myself that teaching & covering are not the same and that I have to let some things go in order to tech other content well. I’m just not going to do Law of Sines & Law of Cosines in geometry. It isn’t happening. I’m trying to be OK with this. I’m also not going to teach simplifying radicals. There. I said it.

So, here’s the plan:

We are going to start the semester with TV Space to motivate the Pythagorean theorem. I’ve asked. My students have not heard of it. I know, they should have, but they don’t know it. They are going to dominate it in a few weeks. We’re going to follow that up with Mathalicious’ Viewmongus, which, at this point, students should be able to work through pretty comfortably. I know this is a lot of Pythagorean Theorem, but I’m trying to build persistence and a culture of problem solving as the semester gets going. Then I am going to support my students writing a program in their TI-84’s to use the Pythagorean theorem given 2 coordinates (AKA distance formula). I plan to use the sheet shared by Jasmine Walker as a guide.

Right after that, I’m hitting ’em with Taco Cart. Dan & Fawn have done wonderful work. I’m so so so excited about finally getting to do Taco Cart. Yes, its the holiday break & I can’t wait for school to start to get in some serious problem solving with me being less helpful!

Then we’ll spend a day reviewing midpoint & programming in that baby to the TI’s. Next we’ll spend a class period on Pam Wilson’s distance & midpoint activity. I may make it into a scavenger hunt, as mentioned in the comments, we’ll see how ambitious I am when we get to that. Depending on how the pretest for this unit goes, I may do a 1 day activity reviewing slopes of parallel & perpendicular lines, then we are off & running with coordinate quadrilateral proofs. I’m sure I’ll throw in Illustrated Mathematics’ Is this a Rectangle? The big project for this unit will be a choice between Jasmine Walker’s quadrilateral programming project or Mathy McMatherson’s Facebook project described here & incorporating his reflective follow up here.

Then we’re hitting up some right triangle trig. I think I am going to go old school with this unit. I’ll introduce the concept using Tina Cardone’s geogebra exploration, but then I think were just going notes & practice: roundtables, problems around the room, row games. Once we’ve got it down we’ll build clinometers to measure tall stuff outside (flagpole, maybe?). That’s probably all we’ll get in in the next 6 weeks, but I intend to follow this up with this awesome trig task as soon as I can, maybe the start of the next 6 weeks. I’m like a kid in a freggin’ candy store with all of the awesomeness spewing out of the MBToS! Y’all fire me up!

Here’s the learning target tracking sheet for the next 6 weeks: