Course Guide - USAID Teacher Education Project

3. Class ActivitiesHere are some sample "prompts" that are designed to help students think about themany concepts they will encounter during the Geometry Unit.1) When did you first start learning geometry? If students say the first learned aboutgeometry in high school, ask about what they think young children might alreadyknow about geometry.2) What geometric shapes and forms do you see in this room? Do you think youngchildren would be able to notice those things, too? How could you help youngstersbegin to see the geometry in their environment (shape of the windows, tiles on thefloor, stripes on clothing, the circle of a clock, polygons on a soccer ball, etc.).Extend questions about these 2-dimensional shapes by asking about 3-dimensionalforms (a book (cuboid), a pencil (cylinder or hexagonal prism), a ball (sphere), acardboard packet (cuboid), etc.).3) After this informal discussion about polygons and polyhedra, ask about the genericnames for polygons, which are dependent on the number of a polygon's sides:triangle, quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon, (you may omit the 7-sided septagon orheptagon) and octagon.Ask why is there no 2-sided polygon.4) Continue by asking:• What do you think is implied by the term "regular" polygon? Why might agiven polygon be called "regular" versus "irregular"?When talking about polygon shapes, do students mention parallelograms, rhombuses(rhombi), and trapezoids?Do they realize that a square is a rectangle? If so, can they explain why? Is a squarea rhombus? If so, can they explain why?5) Ask about circles? Circles are closed shapes, but not polygons. This might giverise to a definition of a polygon as well as descriptions of shapes that are notpolygons.Is a "ball" a "circle"? If so, why? If not, why not?What about a cube versus. a square?Is a "box" a 2-dimensional shape (such as a box to tick on a survey) or a 3-dimensional form (such as a packet of rice)?Why do you think young children (and even adults) use these kinds of termsincorrectly and interchangeably?