Geometry and Angles

My geometry teachers came to me and wanted to try the picture books out on their classes. One of the teachers had used the math adventures of Sir Circumference by Cindy Neuschwander the year before on her own, but was looking for something simpler and faster that could be shared between teachers.

We looked at their topic schedule for the semester and came up with three ideas we wanted to use with the picture books (angles, reasoning, and triangles). Our first lesson was an introduction to angles, and I used Hamster Champs by Stuart J. Murphy.

This is a very silly, cheesy story about three hamsters that outsmart the family cat with car stunts and ramp angles. It was a quick, fun read and the students enjoyed it.

After the reading, we used a simple Angles Chart from Scholastic and had the students get up out of their seats and use pipe cleaners to find acute, obtuse and right angles within the classroom. It wasn't as easy as you might think...the obtuse angles were the most difficult to find. The entire activity took about 15-20 minutes and the students had a quick intro to the next week's lesson.