Investigating triangles by @elanimcd

During our inquiry into triangles with my grade 6 MYP class, we reached for old-fashioned technology – and with great results! Students were really engaged throughout this activity.

This is a re-blog post originally posted by Elani McDonald and published with kind permission.

The original post can be found here.

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I started by giving students an example of triangles with their identities written inside, and they had to label these. For example, acute and isosceles, students had to identify the acute angles within that triangle and then had to indicate the two sides that are of equal length in order to make it an isosceles triangle.

Here is a great example of two of the pieces of work the students produced:

I then asked them to use the exact same triangles (I made two copies of the same triangles), and to cut out the angles (HINT: if you are getting the students to do this activity, get them to cut it round, otherwise it becomes difficult to see where the original angle was).

After cutting out these angles, students were asked to glue together these angles to find the pattern in the angles.

After repeating it several times, students realised that it demonstrates that the interior angles of a triangle will always add up to 180 degrees.

The verdict: Great use of time, quick activity, but students find it so easy to remember that interior angles add up to 180 degrees. Give it a go, it’s so worth it!

You can read other articles by Elani by clicking here