Shaping Mathematical Understanding

There was one single unit in math that actually made me excited for class: geometry. I've always considered this unit to be the artsiest mathematical unit, and as a self-identified artist, I was always drawn to geometry. Working with shapes engaged my inner artist, and satisfied the visual learner in my brain. Naturally, I didn't enjoy every single lesson as much as others, but overall, lessons were at the very least mildly interesting. My favourite lessons were the ones where we got to draw or physically build shapes.

This geometry teaching guide provides ideas and suggestions for activities to teach geometric concepts. One activity that it mentions are paper nets of 2D shapes that can be folded into a 3D shape (page 28). The Ontario curriculum actually has "identify and construct nets of prisms and pyramids" as required information that teachers have to teach (page 82). While I always enjoyed working with nets as an activity in math class, it fascinates me that the Ontario curriculum made nets an actual expectation that teachers are required to cover, because I never realized as a child that other children didn't have the same ease of connecting 2D shapes to 3D objects that I had. This is an area that as a teacher I need to be careful, because I could very easily teach this concept too quickly and assume that my students understand it without properly checking that they do understand, simply because I find this concept so obvious as a child.

Another activity that the guide suggests is drawing a 3D shape based off of a 2D sketch or description (page 29). One of the things that I love about an activity like this is how versatile it is for different types of shapes, and carrying degrees of difficulty, which makes it easy for a teacher to use differentiation in their lesson while using this activity. Not only can the teacher differentiate the complexity of the shape, but they can also differentiate the clues that they give the students about what the final 3D object is supposed to look like.

One of the sub-units in geometry that I found a little bit dull as a child was the concept of location and movement unit. I never had difficulty understanding the concepts that my teachers were describing, but I always asked myself, "Where would I use this?" One year of my teachers connected cartography to this unit, and when I was given a pirate map and asked to figure out how to find to the buried treasure, I found myself interested and understanding the relevance of this information.