LEARN NC

K–12 teaching and learning · from the UNC School of Education

What's in a Shape?

http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/lessons.cfm?DocID=135

A lesson plan for Grades 3–5 Mathematics

About this resource

Appropriate grades
3–5
Subjects
mathematics (geometry)

Legal

Creative Commons License

This catalog record is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. This license applies to the content of this page only and does not apply to the referenced website.

The purpose of this lesson is to explore characteristics of shapes by making and using tangram sets; to discover how the tangram pieces are related to one another; and to determine how many different combinations of the triangles, squares, and parallelograms in tangram sets can make a given shape. By using tangram shapes, children learn the relationships between shapes, for instance, that two identical right isosceles triangles fit together to form a square. Additionally, children learn that three basic shapes–triangles, squares, and parallelograms, each composed of one or more small right triangles - can be fit together to form many other shapes and figures. One line of research on how people learn emphasizes the helpfulness of making multiple representations of the same idea and translating from one to another. When a student can begin to represent a relationship in tables and in graphs and in symbols and in words, one can be confident that the student has really grasped its meaning.

North Carolina Curriculum Alignment

Mathematics (2004)

Grade 3

  • Goal 3: Geometry - The learner will recognize and use basic geometric properties of two- and three-dimensional figures.
    • Objective 3.01: Use appropriate vocabulary to compare, describe, and classify two- and three-dimensional figures.

Grade 4

  • Goal 3: Geometry - The learner will recognize and use geometric properties and relationships.
    • Objective 3.03: Identify, predict, and describe the results of transformations of plane figures.
      • Reflections.
      • Translations.
      • Rotations.

Grade 5

  • Goal 3: Geometry - The learner will understand and use properties and relationships of plane figures.
    • Objective 3.01: Identify, define, describe, and accurately represent triangles, quadrilaterals, and other polygons.
    • Objective 3.04: Solve problems involving the properties of triangles, quadrilaterals, and other polygons.
      • Sum of the measures of interior angles.
      • Lengths of sides and diagonals.
      • Parallelism and perpendicularity of sides and diagonals.