Lesson Plan Reflection
To start out, I must say that that was a fun unit that gave the students a little
bit of a “brain-break” before we have to dive into the stress of reviewing for our final
exam. However, the fact that the content was less intense than some of the concepts
that we’ve studied in the past may have caused the students not to take the material
as seriously has they have for other tests/projects.
Day One: I started out the day with a discovery channel video which I was
very pleased with. In mathematics we do not get a lot of opportunities to show
movies or videos that tie into our curriculum. This particular video was a great way
to start out the unit and show them how transformations can be applicable in dayto-day life. I had the students record a couple of vocabulary words as they were
watching the videos, but I think next year I’d like them to paraphrase what they
think each of the words mean; have them describe each transformation in their own
words instead of copying the definition verbatim. After the video I gave them a
printout of the PowerPoint lesson I created for this unit so that they could follow
along with the lesson with a little bit more ease, especially since I had decided to
teach three sections of the book in one lesson. With as many transformations that
we had to represent on graphs in this lesson, the printout allowed my lesson to flow
at a much quicker pace than if the students had to draw out each graph for each
transformation.
Day Two: Originally I wanted to do this Geometer’s Sketchpad lesson before I
taught them about the different types of transformations; to have them explore
what the transformations looked like before we defined them. I couldn’t get a
computer lab and had to do this lesson after, but I found it to be a really good
supplementary lesson to the one before it. They had seen the definitions and the
rules and this lesson gave them a more concrete, visual representation to apply to
their previous learned definitions. However, the next time I give this lesson I would
like to change the order of the transformations that they are performing to the
figure. Most of the students didn’t get through all of the problems and the
transformations that are the hardest for them to remember/apply are the rotations.
As the lesson is now the rotations are towards the end so many of the students
didn’t get an opportunity to explore them. I’d like to move the rotations more
towards the beginning of the assignment and move a couple of the reflection
problems towards the end; they serve more as extension problems rather than
essential learnings. I would also ask them to write down the coordinates of the
original image before they start so that it is easier for them to compare to the
coordinates of the new image to write the rules.
Day Three: I think this part of the lesson went very smoothly and was easy to
implement on a Monday. Next year I would like to assign them more homework
problems that have a fraction as their scale factor. Students are typically “scared” of
fractions and with a unit that is generally pretty simple, it would be good to put in
some fraction problems to review the basic math skills that sometimes get lost
among the more challenging math problems that are included in the high school
curriculum.
Day Four: I loved this mini dilation project. It was a perfect way for them to
practice and reinforce the applications of dilations to individual points and see how
it effects the big picture. Plus they had fun with it too!
Day Five: Initially I thought that this section would be the easiest for the
students because they did really well with the translations lesson and the reflections
lesson. This lesson is on “glide reflections” which is a combination of the two.
Curiously the name “glide reflections” really seemed to stump them. Next year I’d
like to take a little bit more time to have them practice a few problems before I
assign them their homework problems. I think we’d still have time to do the
kaleidoscope activity, which was really fun for them; we don’t get to use computers
very often for our class.
Day Six: This was a fun way to wrap up the unit! All of the students made
their own tessellation, which could also be used for their quilt project if they
decided to use it. There were a lot of really cool designs!