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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
