… in geometry, for the first month.
because I can do things like this quickly
And then students get a tone of mileage out of a worksheet like this (thanks Walt!):
And it’s not “always” on my whiteboard, but it’s on there a lot :0
Right at the beginning of geometry I want to focus on helping students draw conclusions from diagrams and given information. Plus I have done a lot of programming and have a natural love for the IF THEN statement.
IF this THEN what? So we got a piece of information – what does it do for us? What does it tell us? And since the IF THEN is not on my main whiteboard (my main one is the big one on the right of the picture above), I have no problem leaving up my IF THEN all the time. And probably most importantly – Having it already on the whiteboard reminds me to use it.
“If angles a and b are complementary THEN a + b = 90” I am reinforcing the point that all we know is that the two angles add up to 90. We don’t know where the angles are located, we don’t know if they are adjacent, we don’t even know how big they are, or what color they are… we just know that they add up to 90 degrees.
Here’s the worksheet above as a pdf:
