Wednesday 9 November 2016

Investigating Triangles

We have been exploring our central idea:

Shapes have got close or distant relationships. and combining this with our other central idea:    When angles co-exist, connections and relationships are formed.


To help us deepen our understandings of both, we are investigating triangles. They are a great way to help children see the wonders of maths with their connections and relationships. They can spark interesting wonderings for children to take ownership in creating and enquiring into. 

We began in small groups.  Each group shared their understandings of different types of triangles and recorded these on chart paper. 


Lots of interesting prior knowledge was shared amongst the groups and wonderings already began sparking and many started trying to find these out together.  It also served as a great pre-assessment to see where our understandings were regarding the properties and connections triangles have. 



Students chose to add some of their wonderings to our poster for either themselves or others to enquire into during our investigations:



To help raise the engagement into triangles, we shared our wonderings and then children had time to choose one or more that they found interesting and had time trying to find out.

One interesting wondering posed was whether this shape was a triangle or not:


The children examining this wanted the whole class to think about it as they were divided. 

So, we found out who in our class thought it was a triangle and or didn't. We were about 50-50 on this.

We listened to the reasons of those who felt it wasn't a triangle and then from those who thought it was.


We didn't come to a definite answer and we thought that in itself is alright. What we did value was that we all used our knowledge to develop reasoning skills which we often discuss is an important element of mathematical thinking.



We then used the think-pair-share strategy to make a list of things we know about triangles using the key concept form.

When we got to the whole class sharing, other interesting wonderings are also shared and these were added to our wonderings poster to explore later.














1 comment:

  1. Thank you so much for sharing. What you are doing is amazing! I can't wait to try it out.

    ReplyDelete

What do you think? ...........