Learning shapes is not boring when using geo-boards

Posted: Wednesday, March 20, 2002

In second-grade teacher Anne Thomason's class, you'll never hear the words, "Gee, I'm bored." But you may hear, "Yea - geo-boards!"

Thomason uses creative, hands-on activities - such as playing with math tools called geo-boards - to reinforce concepts she teaches her Crestview Elementary School students.

On a recent afternoon, her second-graders partnered up, found comfortable spots on the carpeted floor and practiced making geometric shapes on the plastic boards. They fastened rubber bands to its pegs to form different shapes they'd learned.

Thomason instructed, and the students attempted.


Travis Gilliland, right, watches as his partner Will Strebeck arranges the rubber bands in a design.

Joe Chapman/jchapman@amarillonet.com

"I want you to make a square using triangles," Thomason said, "and then tell me how many triangles it takes."

Some of the students configured their squares using four triangles, and some got it down to using just two.

Not snapping the rubber bands or having them shoot off the pegs and hit someone took a bit of extra care, but the students behaved like grown-ups, and no one gave into the temptation to horse around with the potential projectiles.

In between specific instructions, Will Strebeck and Travis Gilliland tinkered around with their geo-board, making elaborate designs and imagining what they might be. They tried to decide whether one particular design looked more like a top, a flying saucer or - if they turned it upside down - a sailboat.

Thomason quizzed the class on the different shapes they'd been learning. On the overhead projector, she drew a trapezoid using three connected triangles and asked the students to identify it.

Not only was it a trapezoid, but it was a quadrilateral, too.

"Why do we call it a quadrilateral?" she asked.

"Because it has three sides," a student said. The three triangles got him confused, so he didn't realize it had four sides.

"Not three sides," Thomason said.

"It has four sides," another student corrected.

"Right. It has four sides," Thomason said. "How many quarters make a dollar?"


"So when you hear 'quad,' you're thinking 'four,' " she said.

It was good for the students to have mnemonic devices for remembering the terms, because these days second-graders go beyond basic circles, triangles and squares. In addition to trapezoid and quadrilateral, they also had to learn terms like pentagon, rhomboid and parallelogram.

Sometimes getting the multisyllabic words untrippingly from their lips was more challenging than knowing which word corresponded with each shape.

Spectacled Jordan Vogel tried to say "quadrilateral," but it came out "quaridralleral."

"If you don't know how to say it, then spell it," Vogel's freckled partner, Billy Hutcherson, suggested. But after suggesting it, he realized that wouldn't be much easier, so he said, "Or point at it."

Despite the kinks, the students benefited from the lesson, Thomason said.

"They enjoy it because there's a lot of creativity involved," she said. "And they begin to see the shapes in real life objects, too."

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