Math Enrichment Lesson with Manipulative Resources

This week I did a lesson with my student on perimeters of various polygons. To help my student understand how to find perimeters of polygons I had her use a geoboard to create different polygons. We focused on triangles, squares, and rectangles.

I asked my student if she had ever used a geoboard before. She said no and seemed really excited to get to use rubber bands to create various shapes on the geoboard. I remember my student saying a while back that she does not use manipulative resources in her classroom. That could explain why she had never seen a geoboard before. I find it very valuable to use manipulative resources when teaching lessons because it helps students understand what they are learning better. Manipulative resources, especially in mathematics courses, allow students to actually see what they are learning or trying to demonstrate as opposed to just reading or writing about it. Each week I plan to use some sort of manipulative resource with my lesson that I am teaching so that the lesson is more hands on for my student and she will get the chance to use the resources that she does not have or get to use in her classroom.

This week my student gave me a suggestion on how to be a better teacher and it made me laugh. I had given her multiple sheets of dot paper so that she could sketch each polygon that she created on the geoboard onto paper. I had given her a separate piece of paper for each polygon that she created. She told me instead of doing that I should have saved paper and just had her draw multiple images on the same piece of paper. She said it would make it easier for me to grade too. That made me laugh! I will definitely keep her suggestion in mind when I do future activities that require paper.

One thing I realized this week is you do not always have to stick exactly to your lesson plan if something better comes to mind or there is a teachable moment as you are teaching your lesson. This happened in my lesson plan this week. My original closure activity was to have the student find an object around the classroom that was a polygon and then estimate what the new image would like if that object was stretched or shrunk and then we would measure the perimeter of that object. Instead of doing this, I noticed my student wanted to create her own polygon on the geoboard (a very unusual shape) and then determine the perimeter of that. I thought this would be a great way to wrap up the lesson and allow her to show me what she had learned. So I had the student create some sort of polygon on the geoboard, determine the perimeter, and then change the polygon in some way so that she could determine a new perimeter. This was a successful closure to the lesson and I could tell she really enjoyed using the rubber bands to create polygons on the geoboard.

I am looking forward to working with my student again next week and doing a lesson that involves using a different manipulative resource.