257: The Experience

If I have learned one thing about geometry so far this semester, it is that it's a scary thing! However, today we did a really cool activity that helped me out visually! We took some gum drops and built different shapes, such as a cube, triangular prism, and a square pyramid. Putting together these shapes with the toothpicks and gumdrops really helped me see the edges and vertices. After the polyhedra was built, the gumdrops acted as the vertices and the toothpicks were the edges. I definitely will be using this activity in my future classroom teaching geometry. Not only was it helpful and engaging, but it can be fun and you can always let your students eat them gumdrops as a treat! I included a picture to show the end result so you can get an idea of what they looked like. Hope you all find this as helpful as I did! I also included a website that will show to how to build shapes even larger than mine!  Click here  and give it a try! Have fun and happy blogging!

Shapes, shapes, shapes! Shapes are fun to learn in pre-school when all you need to know what it is. fast-forward to geometry and they have lines, and angles, and vertices, and they can also be convex or concave, simple or closed.. Uhmm yikes! It all starts with a polygon. A polygon is a plane figure with at least three straight sides. Each polygon is classified by its number of sides. And some polygons can be other polygons, but those certain polygons can't be the first polygons. Weird, right? For example, a square can be considered a rectangle, but a rectangle can not be considered a square. But why you ask? Let me explain. A square is classified as having four equal sides and four right angles, BUT a rectangle is classified by having four right angles and two pairs of opposite, equal sides. Tricky, right? Now let me tell you about triangles. They have three types, a scalene, an isosceles, or an equilateral. But wait, there is more! It can also be an acute, right or obtuse iso...

For as long as I remember doing math, I remember finding the range, mean, median, and mode. Range is the maximum minus the minimum, mean is the average, median is the middle number, and mode if the number occurring most often. You still with me? Good because I am going to talk to you about this crazy thing called the M.A.D. It stands for the mean absolute deviation. So lets say you have some data, like test scores. Your mean is 73 and your M.A.D is 8. Your mad is going to give you a range of eight below the mean and eight above the mean. So you would be able to say that the test scores majority was between 65 and 81. Still here? Good! There is a great formula to find it and its only half a page long! *insert crying face here* I kind of struggled with the mean absolute deviation at first, but after doing it multiple times, it gets easier. It also gave me a way better understanding of the mean, median and mode. I feel I am able to understand all their definitions way better and can e...

Graphs, graphs, graphs! Who knew there were so many kinds?! Not only are there so many kinds, they are all very specific on what data they can be used with. Some are categorical, some are numerical, and some have trends. The most common ones I already knew a lot about where they group of categorical graphs; the pictograph, bar graph, and circle graph. The numerical set of graphs are the dot plot, line graph, histogram, and stem & leaf plot. Now, I had never heard of a dot plot before, but I knew what the other two were. We talked about line graphs and scatter plots, too. They have different trends that can show whether or not your data is positive or negative! It is amazing how informational graphs can be. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. Some are easy to create, some are hard to create. Some are meant for very large data sets, and some are meant for smaller data sets. I found a fun website that has lots of graph vocabulary!  Graph Vocab  is a fun li...