Numeracy Experience Session 5: Exploring Shapes (27/09/13)

It's Friday!!! Why am I so excited? It's because....Dr Yeap has given us time to explore the museums and find appropriate art pieces for us to work on for our upcoming group assignment. And....lesson will only begin at 7pm, instead of the usual 6pm. So, my friend and I visited the nearest Singapore Art Museum and let me tell you a secret. *whisper* That was my first time entering a museum to look, view and appreciate the art pieces. Really! Ok shh....don't tell my students in school okay?

Tonight in class we explored with shapes via Tangrams. Dr Yeap gave instructions for us to get 7 pieces of Tangrams (2 large triangles, 1 medium triangle, 2 small triangles, 1 square and 1 parallelogram) from him. With that 7 pieces of Tangrams, we need to identify and explore how many different sized squares can we come up with.

 

Of course, after attending Elementary Mathematics for the 5th night, we tried to "outsmart" Dr Yeap and created a shape with a square within.

 

 

 

 

Needless to say, Dr Yeap rejected the idea, as what he was looking for was a whole square and not a square within. So much for trying to outsmart him...Hehe...

 

Another interesting problem that we explored was with regards to finding the area. The question was: With a rectangle-shaped paper, cut or tear out 2 congruent triangles. Then, with 1 congruent triangle, try to make it back into a rectangle. How do you then find the area of the rectangle? When I was copying this problem onto paper, I was actually quite puzzled with the expectation of this question. The first part about tearing out 2 congruent triangles from a rectangle-shaped paper, that was quite clear. However, it was the second part that was drumming my brain cells until I literally gave up and await for the solution. The solution? Genius.

 



 

 

What I discovered from Dr Yeap in today’s session:

 

Shapes are not 3D. Shapes are 2D.

 

Signing off till another note,

Miss Khadijah Senan