Geometry: Seeing, Doing, Understanding - Assignment Example

The paper "Geometry: Seeing, Doing, Understanding" is a wonderful example of an assignment on education. Activity Children passing through their first grade mostly base their understanding of what they see. This makes them recognize geometric figures on the basis of how they appear to them but not their priorities. At this level, the learning involved is to familiarize the children with the names of these geometric shapes like triangle, square, circle and rectangle. Getting to elementary school, children are expected to investigate the geometric shapes learned earlier. This means that they should be in a position to identify the properties of the geometric figures and be able to recognize them on the basis of their properties and not their appearance. For instance, the children should be able to understand that a geometric shape like a rectangle is made up of four right angles and when it is rotated, it will still remain a rectangle (Harold, 2009). Students should also learn the properties of parallel lines as well as parallelograms. Such knowledge should help the students divide the basic shapes into several other different shapes like having a square divided to become two rectangles (Harold, 2009) as well as putting together different shapes to come up with a new one that they can easily identify. 

Activity Instruction
During the learning of a given geometry concept, the students should be shown both incorrect and correct examples and this has to be done in different representations and ways like rotating the objects upside down. At this stage, children should be asked to differentiate among the examples given, the ones that are incorrect and ones that are correct. By doing this, misconceptions will be avoided.
The students should then be asked to come up with drawings of incorrect and correct examples representing a given geometry concept. A good example of this is asking the students to draw lines that are parallel and those that are not. If they manage to accomplish this, they should now be asked to come up with a parallelogram and then a quadrilateral which is not a parallelogram (Harold, 2009).
By referring to the above point, the students can now be challenged to give a definition of a given concept. This will make them reason out on which properties among the definitions they have provided are necessary and those that are not really necessary.
The students should then be allowed to investigate, experiment and thereafter play with geometrical figures and ideas. At this stage, the instructor should make use of a lot of drawings and manipulative.
The final stage is to have every student make their own geometry concepts in their individual books.
Materials needed 
  Drawing material such as compasses, protractors and rulers are required as well as different objects that come in the form of circles, rectangles, squares, and parallelograms.
Mathematics Standards Observed
The activity will enable the students to understand and come up with abstract definitions, differentiate between the conditions that are sufficient and those that are necessary for any given concept as well as be able to understand the relationship that exists among different shapes. This will give the students at elementary schools a strong foundation for the deductive and formal reasoning when they get to high school geometry (Harold, 2009). Read More