Transformations Notebook Pages

3/12/2013

transformations notebook page

I love teaching transformations. It's one of my favorite times of the year in math class. I spent a lot of time looking at different ideas for our interactive notebooks and this is what we did.

I printed some figures on cardstock for the students to cut out. I like the bright colors because I think it makes the concepts stand out on the page. We traced the shapes then reflected, translated, and rotated them. We used tape on one side of the triangles to show a reflection and glued in other figures and labeled them all. This part was a review for the students and a reminder of the definition of each term.

We also did a page similar to the one in this blog I found on Teaching Blog Addict to compare line symmetry and rotational symmetry. Most middle school students are pretty proficient at line symmetry but rotational symmetry is a bit trickier because it requires a big dose of visual-spatial reasoning. Some students just have a hard time seeing the new orientation in their minds. It takes practice, and I think the interactive notebook page helps them with this concept.

Since my students do transformations on a coordinate plane, I designed these templates for our interactive notebooks. I have to say it took me a long time to get them to line up just right! I printed them in black and white then colored them to make the figures stand out. I made the reminders to help them remember the rules for find the coordinates of an image after reflecting a figure over the x-axis or y-axis.

Both of these templates are in my TpT and Teacher's Notebook stores.
Click on the pictures to go to that specific item in the store.

3 Comments

Andrea

6/17/2013 01:27:44 am

I will be doing Interactive Notebooks for the first time next year. I have been wondering, do you begin your lesson with the notebooking since the majority of the info placed there are reminders? OR do you teach some items first and then add the items to the notebook? I hope this isn't a silly question. :-)

Alicia

6/17/2013 03:16:00 am

Hi Andrea! That's definitely not a silly question. I did these notebooks for the first time this year and my classes very graciously went along for the ride as we experimented with some different strategies. When I first really started looking into interactive notebooks what I found had them set up to have teacher input, notes, etc. on the right side and student reflections, mini-labs, or work on the left side. Honestly I didn't stick to that. What we did really depended on the lesson we were covering. Sometimes the class did an activity first then we filled in the notebooks and at other times I gave them notes first. It also depended on if we were covering content that was completely new to them or if it was something that was more of a review. Since it was my first year doing the notebooks there were lessons where we took traditional notes simply because I didn't have time to find or create foldables or other graphic organizers. I had to just remind myself that it's okay to have a learning curve when I'm doing new things! It helped that one of the other middle school teachers at my school was also implementing interactive notebooks in her classes so I had someone to bounce ideas off of and we were able to share what did and didn't work for us. We both think these notebooks are one of the best things we've done with our classes. If you don't have anyone to collaborate with as you develop your ideas and put your notebooks together please feel free to comment and write me. I would LOVE to help you! Good luck with your notebooks. I hope you enjoy doing them as much as I do!

Andrea

6/17/2013 04:38:39 am

Thanks for you reply! That makes so much sense. I find the right side/left side a bit restrictive and feel that I would just go with the topic at hand. I will definitely comment and write you because I am alone in this, but I'm so excited about it because I think it is going to be awesome for my students. :-)

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Author

I LOVE teaching middle school math! All the potential for learning and growth is inspiring. I have a master's degree in math education, and I've taught 6th - 8th grade math for more than a decade. I've also been a 5th grade teacher and an upper elementary math specialist working with small groups of students who struggled with math. I'm excited to write about what we're doing in class and hear your ideas too!

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