Geometry Labs is a book of hands-on activities that use manipulatives to teach important ideas in geometry. These 78 activities have enough depth to provide excellent opportunities for discussion and reflection in both middle school and high school classrooms.
- Middle school teachers will find many labs that help prepare students for high school geometry by getting them to think visually and become familiar with fundamental concepts, figures, and vocabulary.
- Teachers of high school geometry —whether traditional, inductive, or technology-based— will find many labs that approach key topics in their curriculum from a different point of view. In some cases, the labs in this book can replace corresponding lessons in your textbook. Other labs can be used to preview or review material that you teach in more traditional ways.
- Trigonometry teachers will find a new approach, using the CircleTrig geoboard, to introduce basic right-triangle and unit-circle trigonometry concepts. This approach also makes trigonometry accessible to younger students.
You may download the whole book or individual sections for your non-commercial use.
- The whole book (3.2 MB)
- Table of contents, Introduction
- Section 1: Angles
- Section 2: Tangrams
- Section 3: Polygons
- Section 4: Polyominoes
- Section 5: Symmetry
- Section 6: Triangles and Quadrilaterals
- Section 7: Tiling
- Section 8: Perimeter and Area
- Section 9: Distance and Square Root
- Section 10: Similarity and Scaling
- Section 11: Angles and Ratios
- Notes, Special Papers, and Answers
For a preview of some labs from the book, see:
- Extensions and revisions:
- Extension of Lab 1.10: Soccer Angles, using interactive geometry software.
- Extension to Lab 10.2: Similar Rectangles. Include "tilted" rectangles in your search.
- Different version of Lab 10.4: Rep-Tiles, including an extension.
- 10cm Circle (PDF), to work on Chapter 11 on paper.
- 10cm Circle in Cabri, and Sketchpad. (The latter contributed by Roger Gemberling.)
