Lesson One:

Defining the Shapes

Objective:   The objective of this assignment is to have the students demonstrate an understanding of the different shapes that they will come into contact with in geometry lessons. 

 Grade: Three/ Four

 Length of Lesson: 1 hour

 GCO: Students will demonstrate spatial sense and apply geometric concepts, properties, and relationships.

 Related SCOs:

·        4E9: sort quadrilaterals under property headings

·        4E7: recognise name, describe, and construct equilateral, isosceles, and scalene triangle.

Materials:

·        Paper

·        Pencil

 Procedure:

·        The first part to this lesson is to create a KWL chart and find out what the students know about geometry and what they want to know about shapes. The teacher should focus on different kinds of shapes such as triangles, circles, squares, polygons, etc. The teacher should also make sure that the topic of three, four, six sided shapes is addressed which can lead into further discussions on shapes with more than six sides.  The teacher will refer back to this chart throughout the unit to determine what the students have learned about geometry from the lessons.

·        Students will create a dictionary of geometric terms by writing a description of the shapes and drawing diagrams to show the shapes.

•  Each student will be given a piece of paper and a cue card with the names of the shapes that they will be describing.

·        Depending on the number of terms to define and the class size the students may be put into pairs to complete the assignment. The students will be asked to think about the several different ways to describe a particular shape, if any, and as an extension to this activity students can focus on angles, length of sides, parallelism, symmetry, etc. 

  ·        Once the definitions have been compiled the students will be given time to discuss them as a class.

·        The completed definitions and diagrams will be put together into a wall display that can be added to as the unit progresses and new terms are found.

Evaluation: The evaluation for this lesson will consist of the teacher making sure that the work has been completed, is correct and is neat and easy to understand. The teacher should walk around the room to make sure students are on task and understand the assignment. Once the assignment has been completed the teacher will lead a class discussion and ask the students questions about what they have learned about the shapes.

Inclusion Strategies:

Hearing Impaired: Visual aids will be used for those students who are hearing impaired and handouts will be given with instructions for the lesson. The hearing impaired student will be paired with a non-hearing impaired classmate and class discussion points will be written on the chalkboard for all students to see.

 Visually impaired:  Visually impaired students will be paired with a student who is not visually impaired.  These students will be given the instructions orally.  These students will be able to know what is going on in the class discussions through hearing. Their partner can write the definitions on the card and make sure that the visually impaired student is involved in the process of creating the definition. The visually impaired student will also be provided with models of the shapes in question so that they can feel the shape and make judgements about the properties that they feel.

Students of English as a second language:  Students where English is a second language should be provided with lots of visual support, as with students with hearing impairment.