Lesson Plans – Assignment Ronni Bailey

In Geometry, we study finding the area under a curve using a bunch of vertical trapezoids. I found this interactive website where students can actually create their own equation and find the area under a curve by using geometric shapes that change in size in order to adapt to their space requirements. This would be a great activity to do at the end of a class period, once students have been taught about finding the area under a curve by finding the area of vertical trapezoids.

http://www.sci.wsu.edu/math/math107/Learn/Integration/sum.html

This is the best website for interactive exploration involving medians, altitudes, angle bisectors and perpendicular bisectors of triangles. I will be using this as a lab with my students sometime within the next few weeks. It requires a program called Geometer’s Sketch Pad, but fortunately our school already has it on all the computers. The neat thing is that the lesson has step-by-step instructions and yet it is modifiable if I wanted to add something. The lesson plan has great student accountability in that it has students save their sketches to a disk and they are required to answer questions along the way.

The lesson plan actually has a link so that one could down load a demo copy of Geometer’s Sketch Pad. The lesson plan also includes notes for both the teacher and the students.

http://www.geom.umn.edu/~demo5337/Group2/

This website offers another great lab for use with Geometer’s Sketch Pad. This lab has to do with reflections, rotations, dilations and translations, otherwise known as the four transformations. Knowledge of transformations is a requirement according to State Standards and this lab is perfect. It gives step-by-step instructions on how to use Geometer’s Sketch Pad to create animated projects. Again, if you don’t have Geometer’s Sketch Pad, a demo is available for down load.

The lesson plan asks higher order questions to make students really think about and explore what is really happening during each transformation. This is yet another lab that is very beneficial to geometry students.

http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/misc/

When I first came across this lesson plan, I wasn’t sure if it would be more of a game, or more educational. Well, I was impressed. So many times we tell students that they need to be able to solve a mathematical equation for a specified variable, but we don’t give them any real life application until they get to geometry or even physics. This lesson plan is designed in such a way that students won’t even realize that they are learning. They are playing a game and then creating their own game. This lesson plan demonstrates how the game works and then has the students practice once before trying it on a friend. This would be a great project for intermediate algebra students to do in pairs. Next, the lesson plan shows a different game by applying the same understanding of algebra in a different way. Finally, each student makes up their own game by choosing their own pattern and practicing it on another student. Before they know it, they have leaned a practical use for solving for a variable and even made a fun math game out of it. THIS IS GREAT!!!

http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/Lessons/calen.html

This web site would be lots of fun if you had about ½ of a period. This is good for intermediate algebra students who are realizing that there are other types of graphs than just linear ones. The term exponential has little meaning to most, if not all, intermediate algebra students until they see this lesson plan. They will discover how fast numbers increase when they increase exponentially by imagining that they are offered a 30 day job for a flat pay of 1 million dollars or an exponential pay starting at one cent a day. After the initial shock of how exponents work, they will discover how to develop an exponential equation and then how to modify it given different conditions. There are notes for the teacher and links to other great sites that will act as resources for the better understanding of exponents in algebra.

http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/pro/rich.html