Geometry Station Activities by Walch
With little time to plan, I jumped right in to a set of station activities for my semester – block Geometry classes!
My first run was with the parallel lines / transversals stations (I know its a bit out of order, but it will be okay!).
I instructed students to take out one sheet of graph paper and we folded them in half, labeling Station 1 & 2 sections on one side and Station 3 & 4 sections on the back side. Students were in groups of 3 or 4. I know the big idea is to move around to the various stations – but my new room is too small :(. Rather than running a ton of copies, I made 3 complete sets of the statin instructions and placed them into page protectors. Students completed their work on the graph paper. When complete, they would exchange their station instructions for another station set located in front of the room. This way students do not have to wait on other groups to complete before moving on.
Using a different color for each station, I highlighted the station # and any Words Worth Knowing (thanks everybody is a genius blog!). Two of the lessons called for spaghetti, I used toothpicks. Each student will also need protractors. The stations are not dependent on one another, so order of completion did not matter.
The discussions were great because students’ angle measures were not equal to their group members’ but the same “patterns” occurred. I probably like the discussion questions component of the activities best. Each student responds to a given set of questions in writing. Then they must pair up with someone who was not in their original group to discuss their responses. Simple misconceptions are quickly cleared up during this time.
The layout of this lesson allows students to talk about and look for patterns during the station groups. They process their new information as they write responses and allowed to share verbally again with a partner. Finally, as a whole class we debrief the entire lesson(s). This format really supports the literacy strategies discussed this summer in our twitter book chat #lit4math.
I like that no prior knowledge was required for students to successfully learn about transversals and the special angle relationships formed when parallel lines are present.
I have compared the listed CCSS for Geometry Station Activities to the suggested Geometry standards of Appendix A and this book addressed over 75% of those standards. Only the measurement and any probability suggested for Geometry are not included in this book. There are 16 station sets and I have my students for 18 weeks…my thought is to use at least one per week, as appropriate… I’ll share more as we get in to the semester. But for this first run, I say 2 thumbs up.
*Station 4 deals with corresponding angles – and I reworded Question #1, because it was misleading. Anytime you use investigations, you should definitely go through the entire lesson / activity before presenting it to your students. (duh?) I see this happen too often, teachers just pull out an activity and pass out to students with little/no knowledge of what students will expect / questions they will ask. The book also gives a list of possible student misconceptions to watch for.
If your students are not used to this layout of lesson – it may take a little more time to get them through it. Once students got a feel for it, the last stations went more smoothly and quickly.
I hope to hear more from others who are using station style lessons. @tbanks06 also shared some experiences with stations for #myfavfriday and said its the best $40 you’ll spend this year! Shop around – I found all 3 of my station books for under $85 total.
Got to give a little shout out to HoppeNinjaMath – welcome her to math teacher blogging!
Station Activities for Algebra I
I began working on creating cards for the activities needed in this book:
. I typed the “index cards” needed for several of the lessons. Feel free to borrow/tweak and use in your classroom – and share – please, just don’t sell “my cards.” You can find the card sets I completed here.
I am now teaching Algebra 2 and Geometry, so the Algebra I project is not going to get completed anytime soon. Sorry.
the radical rational... 