By Heidi Samuelson
It’s that time of year again…the time we start working on geometry skills in fourth grade.
This strand of math skills is rich in vocabulary that students need to sort through to help them understand the tasks they will be asked to perform…intersecting lines vs. perpendicular lines…rays vs. line segments….points and….well…you get the picture.
My students love app-smashing iPad apps together to create “mini posters” to share what they are learning. This year we’ll be using a free app from The Math Learning Center called “Geoboard” with PicCollage to share our learning with others in Seesaw.
How’s that for smashing together some great apps?!?
To get started on their projects students will use an online math dictionary to look up and define the words we’ll be using during our study of geometry this quarter. Both Visual Mathematics Dictionary and Illustrated Mathematics are fairly good online resources that incorporate both words and images into their definitions of math vocabulary words to help students get a better understanding of the word they’re trying to define. At this point in the game, students are working collaboratively to define the words they’ll be creating and sharing posters about in Seesaw. They have a list of vocabulary words that they’re responsible for defining. We’ll meet as a group to discuss the different terms and share definitions and ideas about what they’ve learned BEFORE heading to the creating stage of the lesson.
The next step is to create some examples of the words we’ll be using in the Geoboard App.
Students take screenshots of their completed examples. They crop their screenshots to show just the geoboards and then upload into PicCollage. Now they’re ready to add in the definitions and some more details to share their learning with others using our Seesaw Learning Journals.
Heidi Samuelson is a fourth grade teacher who enjoys sharing ideas and activities with teachers across the globe. Heidi shares presentations on ideas for technology integration and activities with her school district as well as in webinars like “Classroom Live 2.0”. You can find many of her shares on the blog, “Mrs. Samuelson’s Swamp Frogs”. She is a Seesaw Ambassador and the Co-Creator of “The Global Math Task Twitter Challenge”. Connect with Heidi to “Share the Learning” on Instagram (@swampfrogs) and Twitter (@swampfrogfirst)