Entry #10: Manipulating geometry! 🖐

Manipulating geometry!

Throughout the blog, I have been sharing many digital tools to learn geometry, such as Google Maps or even Minecraft. However, and as I mentioned in a previous entry following what Villarroya (1994) said, it is a fact that manipulation is essential in order to learn geometry. For that reason, I have been researching in order to share with you some manipulative materials which can be quite interesting 🔎. 

Nevertheless, I would like to invite you to take a look at the final degree project of Miguens (2016), who has designed a quite interesting set of manipulative activities and materials for students who are in the fourth year of Primary Education. Take a look at it! 👀 Anyway, now it is my turn, I am going to show you the promised materials. Ready, set... go! 😆

Polydron

The first one is the polydron. This material was totally unknown to me, but it has many interesting uses for learning geometry. Anyway, what does it consist of? Well, it is a set of figures, among which we can find squares, triangles, etc., that can be fitted together, forming other plane figures or even solids. What kind of aspects could we work on with them in order to make our students learn geometry? First, of course, we can manipulate the plane figures themselves, and then join them together to construct, for example, polyhedra. However, it can also be interesting to work on tessellations. We can ask the students to try to check with which figures the plane can be tessellated. Interesting, isn't it? 😏

Net of a polyhedron

The net of a polyhedron is a succession of polygons in the plane joined by their sides, so that we can fold them in order to form a polyhedron. Are you thinking the same as me? 😏 With this, we can build polyhedra in the classroom! Have you ever built a polyhedron manually? I personally did, but during my 10 years of compulsory education I only did it once! In fact, it was not even in Primary Education. Being honest, I do not understand why... but here we are to change that. So, we can give our students the net of a polyhedron and ask them to cut it out and assemble the polyhedron in question. In this way, we can see how many faces it has, what its faces look like and all these aspects that are sure to be of interest to them. It is not an expensive resource and there are thousands of models to bring to the classroom on the Internet! 💻

Mecano

Another interesting resource is that one known as "Mecano" (yes, like the band... the joke was on the money 😆). Anyway, this material is composed of little sticks that can be joined together to form polygons (regular or not). From my point of view, this material is quite interesting in order to learn different geometric properties related to flat shapes. For example, we could see that the diagonals of a rectangle are congruent in a manipulative way. If you have more ideas, share them in the comments! 😉

Tangram and geoboard

Although I have tried to share with you resources that are not so well known, it is inevitable to mention both the tangram and the geoboard, as they are two of the classic resources for learning geometry. As you may know, the objective of tangram is to build different figures using basic geometric shapes such as triangles. However, we could also work on the different properties of those geometric shapes. Regarding the geoboard, I invite you to read the entry in which I wrote about a digital geoboard, since it can be useful for you to learn new activities to work with a manipulative one! 👀

That is all for now. Please, let me know if you use more resources! 😊 Thank you for always reading me.

References

Miguens, P. (2016). Material lúdico-manipulativo para el aprendizaje de geometría en 4º de Educación Primaria [Final Degree Project, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja]. https://reunir.unir.net/handle/123456789/4289 

Villarroya, F. (1994). El empleo de materiales en la enseñanza de la geometría. Revista Interuniversitaria de Formación del Profesorado, 21, 95-104. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=117840