Movement and Geometry: learning by playing outside 🌳

Good morning, everyone!

Today, we are going to talk about a very important topic: expanding the limits of the classroom. Children enjoy movement, dinamic activities like running and jumping around in an opened space... Then, why don't we take advantage of this and think about ways of teaching Geometry using movement?

Here we have a really easy idea that we can do in the playground of the school ⇨ A game called "JUMP!", which has the following steps:

• 1. Selecting our favorite geometric figures. Children will choose the figure that they like; a triangle, a circle, a rectangle, a trapezoid...

• 2. Selecting a colour for the figures. Once they teacher picks up all the figures selected by the students, they will decide which colour belongs to each figure. For example, rhombus can be red, triangles can be orange... 

• 3. Painting the playground. Then, they will go to the playground and they will paint, using coloured chalks, a lot of those figures on the ground.

                     

• 4. Playing the game: finally, the teacher will explain the game ⇨ The teacher will say one figure, for example, "Rectangles", and children have to go from one extreme of painted area to the other, jumping from rectangle to rectangle, without touching the other figures.

I hope that this dinamic game is useful for your classroom!

Bea. 

🖁 Geometry App! 📱

Hey, guys!

This post is dedicated to an App called "Simply Geometry", useful and fun for the first years of Primary School.

While children are learning Geometry at school, it is very useful that the teacher keeps in contact with the families so he recommends some educative and interactive Apps children can use in their free time! We all know that children spend so much time looking at their parents' phone (or even theirs), so giving them educative games can be a way of making that time productive and educative.

These are some activities that the App includes:

• Here, children have to recognise the names of the figures: 

  

• In the first image, they differenciate between 2D and 3D figures, which I think is really useful, and secondly, they understand the concept of "corner": 

 

• Another type of exercise consists in identifying the geometric figures that compose the given figure:

As you will see, this App is free and available for Android. I hope that this is useful for you!

Art ✎ and Geometry

Hi!

Today, we are going to talk about a very interesting topic: the connections between Art and Geometry. Art and Geometry have always been related: we can see it, for example, in "the golden number"or in palaces such as "Alhambra", and  many paintors have always played with figures, shapes and planes to create certain perspectives or ilussions, such as M. C. Escher.

Therefore, we can use Art to introduce Geometry to our students, as a way of motivating them. Art gives children the possibility of expressing themselves and we can use that to make them play with geometrical elements.

• For example, I have found a great didactic proposal (https://aprendiendomatematicas.com/geometria-y-arte/) that we can bring to the classroom, which is based on Kandinsky's pieces of art. Kandinsky, who you can see in the picture at right, was a paintor that played with geometrical forms in all his paintings. 

• In class, we can select several paintings in which a specific geometric figure appear, and then comment it with our students. After analysing the piece of art, children would be able to create their own painting, with one condition: the basis of the paiting has to be the one that Kandinsky used. 

• Through this activity, children would be experimenting different ways of representing Geometry, and they will see their classmates' creations. I personally think that interdisciplinary activities in which we mix several areas are beneficial for the students! 

What do you think about these ideas?

Interactive games for Sixth Graders!

Previously, we have focused on the little ones; now, we are going to focus on the Geometric contents for Sixth Graders (11 and 12 years old).

The level of the contents is higher and the students already have a base about the basic figures and their characteristics, so now they continue learning about angles, perimeters, areas, volumes and revolving bodies. In this post, I am going to show you some interactive games that students can do in class using a computer. These games belong to an amazing site called "MUNDO PRIMARIA", which is a fantastic resource for teachers. Here we have some examples:

• To learn about angles: 

• To learn about perimeters and areas:

• To learn about volume:

• To learn about revolving bodies:

This web has interactive activities about every subject and it is completely free. I have searched on the internet several times already, looking for interesting websites that children can use to practice Geometry exercises, and I have to say that this one has a remarkable design, it is really easy to use it, and it is very well structured.

Using ITC in class! (Information and Communication Technologies) 💻

Hi, guys!

We all know how important technologies are and that we are living in the technologic era. Now, children grow up using technologies: they use them since they are really little and most of them are really interested in them. We need to be careful with the use of technology; however, we can take advantage of all the fantastic resources that they offer us and use them as a motivation in our schools! 

This is why I have found an online website that we can use in Geometry class. It has explanations, games and interactive activities that the students can do using a computer. These four are the ones that I have found more interesting in order to learn Geometry:





You can see how children can play with different pieces in order to move them and put them in a given mould, and how they also learn about the different types of angles and their classification. This is the link to the web: http://www.xtec.cat/~epuig124/mates/geometria/castella/

I hope that you enjoy this information and that you start using technologies in you classrom too!

XOXO,
Bea.

How to build a Geoboard 🔨

Hello!

Today, we are going to speak about geoboards. Geoboards are a really useful tool to learn Geometry, as it allows the students play with the different shapes. There are interactive boards that we can use online, and we will talk about that in future posts; however, what we are going to do know is learning how to build a geoboard in class, which can be a fun activity to do with our students.

These are the materials we need:

• A cork board for each student
• Tacks
• Post-its of two different colors
• Strings
• Adhesive tape

Then, what we need to do is to put the post its in the corck board, alternating the colors, as if it was a chess board. After that, using the adhesive tape, we put all the post-its together and we stick one tack in each edge of the post-its. That way, children can experiment with this didactic material, using the strings! You can see all this procedure in this video so you understand it better:

Geometry and Music in Kindergarten 😊

Today's post is dedicated to the little ones!


Although I'm studying to be a Primary School Teacher, the field of Science that I have selected is Special Needs Education, which implies working with children from 3 to 12 at schools. While I was doing my practice, I saw how the Special Education Teacher worked with 4 and 5 years old children who needed support, and she gave so much importance to the interiorisation of figures and shapes. This means that introducing shapes and figures when children are very little is quite important, as it will help them understand the world that surrounds them.

However, how can we introduce Geometry in a fun way when children are in pre-school? Well, I think that we can use MUSIC as a tool. Music has a lot of benefits, as it activates and stimulates our brain and our memory. Through songs, we can motivate children so they learn about the basic shapes. I have found some songs that I consider to be really useful, I hope you too:

Creating a manipulative material to play with geometric figures! ⬜

Hello, here I am again.

In the last post, we were talking about the importance of turning Geometry into something manipulative, touchable and visual so children can really understand it.

Today, we are going to learn how to create a really simple device that children can use in class to play with shapes and figures. The materials that we need are really simple:

1. 5 tongue depressors or just sticks.
2. Veclcro.
3. Scissors.

Then, what we need to do is to put the depressors together by their ends, using velcro. We will see how children can move the sticks: they can stick and unstick them, creating a different amount of figures such as squares, rectangles, triangles, rhoumbus, pentagons... Also, they can add as many sticks sticks as they want, so we could create an infinite number of figures.

This way, children can see the connections between the figures, they can see how to create a new one from the previous one, they can become aware of the number of sides that each figure has... And they can create the material in class by themselves, as it is easy and not dangerous. 

I have learned this idea through a YouTube video that you can see here, and I think that it is a fantastic idea to introduce children to the first steps of Geometry: 

▲ Understanding Pythagoras ▲

Hi! 

Today, we are going to talk about Pythagoras and his famous theorem. He was a very intelligent man! Thanks to him, Maths, Philosophy, and also Geometry, experimented important progress. It is a figure that we can introduce to our students so they investigate a bit about who he was.

When we were at school, teachers usually asked us to memorise Pythagora's theorem, which we all know: the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. 

And nowadays, we still ask students to do thousands of problems using the formula, without even understanding it... and that's so boring! They do not know why they are using that equation again and again.

So... how can we teach students what it really means? How can children SEE with their own eyes what that formula tells us? Well, you may know this, but these videos have been a total discovery for me:

Just using three containers and playing with water, and using volume to help us, we can see how the water that contains the square of the hypotenuse is the same water that the two other sides' squares need to be full of water. I have always had problems understanding Pythagoras but watching this method was so helpful for me, because it is so visual that just by watching it you understand the theorem. In class, the teacher can try to design a similar mechanism to this one, so children can play with it and think about what connection it has with the theorem. Maths is something so abstract that we need to find ways to make it visual and manipulative.

I hope that you find this idea interesting for you. I will definitely put it into practice if I teach Maths someday!

XOXO,

Bea.

Welcome 🙋 to a world of Geometry!

Hello, everyone!

I'm Bea and I'm studying to be a Primary School Teacher in Málaga's University. 

This blog is one of the projects for our course "Didactics of Geometry". The truth is that I have never been really good at anything related to Maths... But right now I'm discovering so many new ways of teaching Geometry! Different resources, methodologies and tools that I want to share with all of you! 

Through this blog, we are all going to learn how Geometry is in everything that surround us, and we are also going to learn how to teach Geometry at schools in a fun way so that kids really enjoy it! Also, in the comment section, we can share ideas and opinions about Geometry, that way we can all learn new things. I hope to see you there!

XOXO,

Bea.