Coloring Cubes

I think snow days are Mother Nature's way of helping teachers catch up on work. I'm spending my day on the couch, correcting student work. And, to be honest it's pretty encouraging. From their homework, it seems that they actually understand the majority of the material. I can also tell when my students made the turn around in class.

At the beginning of the semester, my block 2 class seemed very apprehensive about geometry. This was especially the case when I began talking about planes. Talking about intersecting planes is like a lesson in the alphabet. You have to name so many letters at a time, that it gets to feeling as though you're just rattling off random syllables. In order to combat this problem, I created a coloring activity. The students were given several cubes on a worksheet, and the idea was to color in the planes with different colored crayons and markers in order to see if they were parallel or intersecting.

What's nice about coloring is that the answer just pops out at you. It becomes very clear. The other nice thing about coloring is that students LOVE to do it. (Don't we all, really? It makes you feel 5 yrs old again.) Even though they knew they could talk with each other during this activity, my students were silent: they were concentrating so hard on coloring.

That day was the day when my students began understanding planes and intersection. It felt as though they began speaking my language.

(I'd love to post my worksheet on this page, but I'm not sure how to (or if I can) do that. If anyone reading does know how, let me know!!)