Amy Ruffo - Collete Bell's Misconceptions of Math through Hands-On Geometry

In this video Ms. Bell provided tangible experiences (hands-on activities) to help break many Geometry misconceptions that students have. The first misconception that she attacked was the idea that students do not recognize that a square is a rectangle because it has all of the properties of a rectangle. They see shapes as separate, distinct shapes and not see the interrelationships between the shapes. She then guided the audience through an exploration of shapes using two activities: Mystery Grab Bag and Attribute Pyramid. I really like the pyramid idea made out of a hanging folder which allows multiple students to be working on the activities on the tower at the same time! The second misconception deals with angles. Sometimes students think that the length of the lines affects the size of the angle. She had two activities to help break this idea: Patty Paper Activity in which you trace the shapes to compare it with another shape's angles and Popsicle Stick Angles where they create angles quickly using two sticks. The third misconception is that the coordinate grid only has one quadrant (the positive one) since elementary students do not go into the negative numbers yet. However, it is important that the students at least get exposed to the fact there are four quadrants. The fourth misconception is that students reverse the points when plotting on the coordinate plane. Instead of plotting x then y, they plot y then x (something my kids do a lot). For these two misconceptions that dealt with the coordinate plane, Ms. Bell again had two activities: the Street Map Activity and the Coordinate Grid game with dice.

In my class this year, I did make sure to incorporate ideas from this video when teaching coordinate planes. In order to expose my class of all four quadrants on the plane, I created an activity call Spit Ball Graphing. I created a large plane on butcher paper and posted it on the outside wall of my classroom. I then had the students spit spit balls through a straw at the grid and plot where it landed. The kids had a blast!