Desperation and Inspiration.

  Yesterday, in geometry, I had students work with points, lines, and rays so they could develop a better foundation for future topics.

The activity was to look at various scenarios such 2 points, 2 lines, 3 lines, 2 rays, etc and they had to suggest an arrangement that produced one, two, or three points.

The two points was easy since all they had to do was stack the points to create one point but they could not arrange them in any way to create two points other than leaving them separate which violates the rules.

With so many blank looks on faces, I know they really couldn't picture solutions to the activity so I pulled out a large number of sticks and passed them out so students could play with them to find the answer.  They gave me crazy looks but I convinced them to arrange and rearrange the sticks until they found solutions.

It was great watching them working together, sharing sticks and ideas.  I had to convince one group of girls that the vertex of the angle did not count as a point.  Instead the angle sides had to cross to be counted.  I loved the way students would think about the various arrangements before deciding if they matched the requirements.

I've used the activity before but this is the first time I've used manipulatives of any type.  It made a tremendous difference in that students had lower frustration levels and enjoyed the activity more.  From now on, I am going to use manipulatives for this exercise.

I was desperate so I found the sticks in my closet because I didn't have anything else that might work for this activity.  I save things "Just in case".  This met the description of "Just in case."  It is amazing how desperation gives us that bit of motivation to get really creative.  I've used sticky notes when teaching function notation, substitution, and any other topic requiring a number replace a variable.

I've created number lines on the floor to help students learn to use positive and negative numbers.  They loved walking back and forth to find the answer various problems.  I've used desks for explaining the angles associated with traversals and for the coordinate plane.  Each idea came out of desperation.

Let me know what you think.  I love hearing from people.