Three Hands-On Geometry Activities

Turn geometry lessons into creative opportunities for students to learn while they build, manipulate and create.  I found three cool resources for hands-on geometry activities that you might like to add to workstations, your classroom project roster, or enrichment lessons. 

• A great place to start for geometry activities is the MathCraft Wiki Page, which has dozens of projects that explore geometric principles.  Many of the suggestions there are eye-catching and complex, so this would be a good resource for gifted students.  Help students strengthen their spatial intelligence by challenging them to create icosahedral planet ornaments, these cool and colorful paper polyhedra, fractal cupcakes or any number of the ideas listed on the site.  Each project contains a step-by-step tutorial.

• Miss Calculate posted this geometry sort on her blog, which helped her students work with triangles, bisectors, medians, etc.  I'm a big fan of sorting!  She asked her students to take their cards and sort them into piles.  Later, after they came up with a different number of piles, she explained that they should have five piles.  She then had them place their cards under the correct labels.  Geometry lesson with no paper and pencil required!

• Construct a tetrahedral kite using little more than straws, a string and some tape.  This includes a step-by-step guide with photos.