More Tangrams Please!

This week in Geometry, we did the 3 Act lesson Hedge Trimmer. I'll debrief about that another time. Students needed to find the area of some isosceles trapezoids along the way and I didn't give them access to the area formula for trapezoids. Instead they needed to be resourceful and figure it out on their own. Well, that didn't go too well at first [cue the whining]. Many students had trouble breaking the trapezoid into 3 polygons: a rectangle and two triangles. Their warm-up the next day was to play around with tangrams for the first 5-10 minutes of class.
Me: Use all seven pieces to make any one of the following polygons. Do your best!
I drew a square, rectangle, trapezoid, parallelogram, triangle, and circle. I'm just kidding about the circle. However, I should have drawn one. That's funny. My 8th grade students were terrible at this. I use "terrible" with all the love in the world, knowing this is a learning experience for them.
Me: Have you guys ever messed around with tangrams?
Class: No!
Me: WHAT!!!! Are you guys serious? No one has ever let you mess around with tangrams before? Well, I'm glad we're doing it now. You guys need this. Seriously? You guys have never messed around with tangrams.
Class: Nope.
Me: Okay, well keep trying. [as I began scraping my jaw off the floor]
My request to you all: MORE TANGRAMS PLEASE!

Especially elementary teachers, more tangrams please. Have your students mess around with them. Sure you can download some app onto your tablet or find a web-based site to simulate tangrams, but please do your best to get actual tangrams into the hands of your students. Math formulas come and go for math students. However, if they can visually break apart polygons into more recognizable polygons such as rectangles and triangles, I believe their mathematical proficiency greatly increases. My goal is to get these 8th graders to play around with Tangrams once a week for the rest of the year. At least one of my students was eventually able to put together a trapezoid (top left), which quickly turned into a parallelogram, which quickly turned into a rectangle.
Me: How'd those other shapes come so quickly?
Sean: I just moved this one larger triangle to different spots.
I took a picture of his first configuration so I could share it with the class. I figured I'd give the class a chance to redeem themselves and copy his rectangle configuration.
More tangrams please! 
Repeat after me:


Thanks for listening.

Tangrams,
1104


BTW: Cheat sheet for displaying student work immediately:

  1. Sign up for Dropbox.
  2. Have the Dropbox app on your phone.
  3. Take picture(s) of student work.
  4. Allow the app to upload your camera photos.
  5. Sync your computer with Dropbox.
  6. The pictures arrive on your computer in seconds.

Wablammo!

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