Unit Plan

Lines and Angles

This is largely an introductory unit for the students, much of the content is laden with tough vocabulary that becomes easily muddled due to all of the minute differences between key terms. Ironically some of these terms came up in my math methods course last week, and 6 graduate students preparing to be math teachers had trouble recalling definitions of specific terms. From my personal experience I think this is largely due to a vocabulary list approach to this content. These lists were mostly disconnected with their physical meanings for me and so they didn’t stick past whatever test I had to take. As an educator I view the real purpose of learning these terms as a way of identifying like angles in order to answer geometric questions without needing to measure angles, which is often unavailable anyway. The vocab meanings are much more important than their sometimes confusing words. My lessons will be packed with images to and examples to show the relationship with much less stress on the terms. If a student can explain why two angles are equal in measure, but can’t remember that we call them corresponding angles I feel that the goal has still been accomplished.                                Another major struggle is the “fun” factor or motivating students to engage with the content. One of my plans to address this is to rely on product assessment much more than the usual textbook assignments. For example the first chapter is on naming and measuring angles. Instead of numbing students’ minds with an assignment like 2-40 even on page 178 I am asking them to draw the layout of their dream (8 room) house in which they must name and measure 15 angles, only 2 of which can be right angles. The following day is classification so they could simply label which angles are right, acute and obtuse.  My hope is that the creativity and relation to something that people actually do outside of school will help students enjoy the content more. I also think it is actually a more valuable use of their time than seeing angles only as lines in a textbook.

The UDL concepts I am specifically using in this curriculum are 1.3, 2.1, 2.5, 3.2, 4.2 and 7.2.

Goal: Use properties of parallel lines, transversals, and angles to find missing sides and angles

8.3.1 Use properties of parallel lines, transversals, and angles to find missing sides and angles, and to solve problems including determining similarity or congruence of triangles.

8.3.2 Use models to show that the sum of the angles of any triangle is 180 degrees and apply this fact to find unknown angles.

8.3.3 Use models and logical arguments to show that the sum of the angles of any quadrilateral is 360 degrees, and apply this fact to find unknown angles.

8.3.4 Use models to explore the validity of the Pythagorean Theorem, and use it to find missing lengths.

8.3.5 Apply the Pythagorean Theorem to find distances in a variety of 2- and 3-dimensional contexts, including distances on coordinate graphs.

8.3.6 Use models and referents to explore and estimate square roots.