I teach geometry at an urban magnet high school of 700 students which focuses on health and business. Our student body is both economically and racially diverse. 72% of my students receive free and reduced lunch. 10% are learning English as a second or third language. 25% of my students demonstrate disengagement through chronically absebces; even more are at risk to be chronically absent by the end of the second quarter, and at further risk of disengagement.
My students yearn for experiences and hands-on activities, and learn best when they have a concrete example of math concepts.
My students are creative and constantly ask how our mathematics that we learn in class will be used outside of our classroom. These students are creative despite the lack of art classes at our school.
My Project
Approximately 25% of our sophomore class are chronically absent, and on average 20% of our student population is tardy every day, demonstrating a relatively high level of disengagement. In my own classes, I've found students are most engaged when we do activities that are creative and hands-on, and that we see more off-task behaviors, referrals for classroom incidents, and disengagement when my lessons focus more on paper and pencil. Unfortunately, I don't have enough resources in my classroom to keep hand-on lessons in lessons regularly.
In order to more fully engage my Geometry students, I want to include as many different opportunities for my students to experience our mathematics hands-on every day.
By including materials such as unix cubes, dice, transparencies, tangrams, and whiteboards in everyday classes, students will be able to see and physically do the mathematics, as well as with old school paper and pencil. Making structures with unix cubes can make learning sequences and deductive reasoning very real and engaging, and often feel more like play to students than classwork. Transparencies are great tools to help students better understand congruence of shapes, line segments and angles. Transformations are a great opportunity to help students understand congruence and coordinate algebra better, and tangrams are a useful tool to understand translations, reflections and rotations. To do a favorite lesson with tessellations, students need scissors to be able to create the tessellated shapes. Dice and student whiteboards make everyday activities different and fun.
Making class more engaging gives students more opportunities to participate in the content matter, and gives them more connections to the content. These materials will help me make math engaging to students at risk for disengagement.
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