Math Journal ... Wednesdays

This post should have gone out on Sunday, but I was so busy with the jackpot event (downloading all those freebies), I put it off a for a few days.

We're currently in our 2D geometry unit - last week we were examining the different types of triangles, and angles in a triangle.  We completed two math journal entries to help us with our understanding of the concepts.







For the first journal entry, we made 6 different triangles (scalene, equilateral, isosceles, acute, right, and obtuse).  (We folded our coloured paper in half and made all of the triangles along the fold so that we could open them and write on them).  We then wrote the terms down on the right side of the page, and matched each triangle to a term.  On the inside of each triangle we also named them a second way (example:  the equilateral triangle is also an acute triangle).  We also measured the angles of the triangles to come to the "big idea" that the sum of angles in a triangle is 180 degrees.  We wrote this on a circle at the bottom of the page.  When folded in half, the front says, "Important".

This above entry went on the right side of the students' notebooks.  For "left side thinking", students had to write a student-friendly learning goal, include what they already know, write what they learned, give proof, and write a reflection.  For the proof, this time I asked them to answer a question.  I asked them if a triangle could have 2 right angles.  This particular student completed a mnemonic device for remembering the 6 ways to name a triangle.

The next day we continued with triangles.  I asked students to construct a triangle (again, along the fold of the paper), with an angle of 115 degrees, and two line segments of different lengths.  We measured the angles to ensure that our completed triangle had angles that added up to 180 degrees.  We then opened up our triangle to make a quadrilateral.  We talked about the line of symmetry (the fold line).  We also measured the angles of the quadrilateral, and the students found that the angles of a quadrilateral equal 360 degrees.  We made another "important circle" for our "big idea" that the sum of angles in a quadrilateral is 360 degrees.  This shape was fun to do because students had to figure out the measure of the reflex angle.






























This above entry was on the right side of our notebook.  We also completed our "left side thinking".  In this particular journal, one of the students made a cross-word type reflection with different terms from our 2D geometry unit.

I am so LOVING the "left side thinking" we've been including in our notebooks (and so has my principal).  If you think this is something you want to try next year, you have to check out A Teacher's Treasure Interactive Student Notebook - I can't wait to include more of her ideas into my math and language notebooks (yes, I'm definitely starting language notebooks) next year.

Happy Wednesday!!!  (half way there ... )