I don't know what it is, but my students have always had trouble keeping the characteristics of quadrilaterals in order. It could be that we usually go through this unit right before winter break and the students might be completing focused. It gets even more difficult for students once we try to take our quadrilaterals to the coordinate plane and try to determine what our figure is based on its coordinates.
A colleague and I were searching for an activity to help increase student understanding of this topic. We found a couple of cool-looking activities online, but nothing that totally fit our needs. Based on what we found, we created our own activity called Polygon and Quadrilateral Detectives in Training.
In this activity, students had to graph a quadrilateral on the coordinate plane. Students had to abide by some parameters in order to keep this from being too easy. For example, students could not include more than one horizontal and one vertical line in their shape. It would be too easy to just look at a shape to see those right angles that line up perfectly with the grid lines on the graph.
They had to use the properties that we had been learning about in class in order to correctly identify the coordinates for their shape. Then, they listed a couple of ways that people could verify the name of the graphed shape.
The next day, groups switched figures. The groups needed to use the slope formula, distance formula, and midpoint formula in order to discover the properties associated with their shape. They were then able to appropriately give the figure a name. Once this was done, students check with the answer key. If there was a discrepancy, the two groups had a conversation to figure out the correct solution.
Overall, I think this activity helped increase understanding for most of my students. When it was time for our summative assessment, students were better able to identify figures and were able to use the formulas to support their answers.
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