Trying to be more hands on...

So earlier this month I attended the regional NCTM conference in Denver. I am very lucky that a regional conference ended up being so close to me, but not so lucky in that I ended up having to pay for it myself and that I was the only person to attend from my district. But I pushed to be able to go and I am soooooo glad that I did. There were so many great things that I am little by little trying to implement in my classroom. I saw a great response by a reader of MissCalcul8; this reader told her that "this year you only have to get half way to perfection". It is my new mantra!!!!

Ok so on to the idea that I am going to try tomorrow. I went to a great hands-on workshop by Gary Kubina (I tried to google him but not much came up, so no link), it was called 'Hands-On/Minds-On Geometry". One of the activities that he did was called 'Planes & Lines'. You were given two lines (straws) and two planes (index cards) and you needed to model certain situations, such as, 'a line intersects a plane at a point', 'two parallel planes', 'two planes intersect in a line', etc. It was AWESOME, why didn't I think of this when I was desperately trying to get my students to understand a 2-D picture was a 3-D situation. So I am going to try it tomorrow as we start to talk about Parallel Lines & Transversals.

Here is how I am going to implement it (my students sit at tables of two):

Each table will have 1 ziplock bag with 4 index card, with holes punched in two locations (2 per student) and 4 straws (2 per student).

Using the items in the zip-lock each student will have to model the following situations, they may not have to use all four items for each situation:

• A line intersects a plane at a point
• two lines are skew lines
• two planes are parallel
• a line is parallel to a plane
• two planes are parallel
• two planes intersect in a line
• two lines intersect in a point
• two lines intersection a plane in two distinct points, the two lines are skew

I think there are some classes that are going to love this. Then I think there will be some kids who wouldn't be happy if there were a Million dollars in the bag too.

Here's hoping it goes well.