"Bloques lógicos"

Here we have another manipulative resource to use in our classes. It consists of 48 pieces (squares, triangles, circles and rectangles), with 3 different colours, 2 sizes and 2 different thicknesses. Thus, each piece has four different variables: shape, size, thickness and colour. We can find many varieties of logical blocks, made from wooden or plastic. 

It is a resource that can be used from pre-school to primary school, creating entertaining activities such as the creation of figures, basic areas and symmetry. As you can see, we can introduce basic geometric concepts since pre-school, using a dynamic methodology making the students enjoy maths. 

Mathspace App

In this digital era, we can find a lot of digital resources to use in our classes, from online webpages to apps for teachers and students. Today I would like to show you a really interesting app, "Mathspace".

 It is a free resource for students and if teachers want to use it in their class they need to pay a small amount of money for it. I think that all schools can afford to pay this resource and it would be a good investment since this app allows the students to solve online problems and receive instant feedback and help at every step. This way, we are monitoring and helping the students during their learning process. 

Mathspace has over 70000 interactive questions about algebra, geometry, probability and statistics. With this resource, they avoid the use of textbooks which can be a boring and demotivating resource.

Here you have some images about it.

Creating with toothpicks!

There is no excuse to work without using manipulative activities in class. It is not necessary to spend a lot of money buying resources since the teacher and the students can create their own materials. For instance, in order to work on geometric shapes we can use toothpicks and plasticine or gummies. 

This activity will motivate our students since they would be working freely and developing their imagination. We can ask our students to create geometric shapes with a certain number of toothpicks and then they will have to guess which is the figure they have created. To do this, we will explain to our students that the number of toothpicks is the sides or edges of the figure and the plasticine or gummies are the vertexes. 

In these photos you can see some examples of how to create geometric shapes with this economic material. 

Do not hesitate to use it in your class! 

Playing with the cartesian plane

As we know, all children enjoy playing games and competing between them. We can use this motivation in our classes in order to arouse the interest of our student and to make dynamic classes. Applying games in classes we are developing the methodology learning by doing, which help the students to internalize and learn easily the concepts.

Here I leave you a video that explains a game about the cartesian plane and coordinates. Through these types of games, we are motivating our students to learn at the same time that they are having fun.

I hope you enjoy the video and use it in your classes! 

Khan Academy

Here you have a really useful website that you can use in your geometry class. 
Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization created by Salman Khan, an American professor, computer scientist, electrical engineer and mathematician in 2006. 

It provides free education to everyone, having more than 4000 instructional videos for primary and secondary school about maths, physics, biology, chemistry, economics and more subjects. Apart from the videos, it offers practical activities that the teacher can send to his/her students in order to do them in class or at home. 

Between some of its advantages, we can find the fact of helping students to learn individually, progressing according to their needs. As we know, in all classes we find students that need reinforcement to acquire some knowledge or competences so these videos will help them to review the content at home. Furthermore, using this website we are providing visual learning which helps the students to understand easily the content of the unit. 

I encourage you to visit this website and discover the amount of videos that it offers!

https://es.khanacademy.org/

Geoboard

At this post we will discover another digital resource called Geoboard, a free app for teachers and students. 

Is an educational tool for exploring a variety of mathematical topics introduced in the elementary and middle grades. Learners stretch bands around the pegs to form line segments and polygons. They can also make discoveries about perimeter, area, angles, congruence...

As you see, is the digital version of the “geoplano”, which can be used in those classes where children have access to an electronic device. This way, we are developing digital competence which is so important in our digital era.

Tangram

Here we have another manipulative educational resource that we can use in our classes to make them funnier. Tangram is a Chinese game consisting of seven elements: five triangles of three different sizes, a square and a parallelogram. All these figures together form a square. It can be used in all cycles of primary education since you can create activities with different levels of complexity. 

With this resource students can learn the forms of the figures, the composition and decomposition of the same ones, promoting creativity in our students since this game present many possibilities due to the combination of its pieces. The advantage of this material is that children can create their own tangram with the help of the teacher and use it then for the activities. 

Here you can see some images about using tangram in geometry classes: