Christmas Tree Forests...and protractors

A few days ago I shared with you what I was *going* to do at school in math in this post.  Well, I finally did it and it came out too cute not to share with you!

My students are learning about triangles, their characteristics, using a protractor to measure the angles, and how to find missing angle measurements when two are known.  So, combining ALL of that, we made these pretty pine tree scenes inspired by this blog post from this lovely blogger.

You can see how the tissue is glued down

To make this was a two step process.  First, the students used a large piece of white paper (we used 17" x 11") and glued tissue paper squares down.  Using regular Elmer's glue and paint brushes, I first had them put a heavy painting of glue in the center of the paper.  They then put a square down and painted over that with glue.  The key to this is a lot of glue.  Every square inch of tissue paper MUST be covered or else when it all finally dries, there will be pieces of tissue flapping around and, well, it looks blah.

They then set that out to dry and using watercolors and crayons, created a nice snowy outdoors scene that will eventually house between 3-6 trees (I let them decide how many to make.)

The next day, the students cut out their trees.  I encouraged them to cut out triangles of all sizes.  They then went to work measuring the angles and describing them.  I asked them to not only measure each angle and record it on the sheet, but also to write down if it was acute-scalene, or any other combination (which meant that they needed to use the ruler on the protractor to measure the sides of the triangle)  Click here to get the recording sheet we used.

Using the protractor to measure the angles.  They did this BEFORE they glued the trees onto the background. 

Here is one final product.  You can see the scene drawn at the top as a sort of diagram to identify which tree belongs with which measurement.

Here is another one that is *almost* complete.  Just need to color the diagram.

Here is a close up of one of the recording sheets. 

You can see this isn't straight

Some of the students had a really rough time measuring the angles.  I, mean, it is one thing measuring computer printed triangles.  It is quite another measuring triangles you cut out yourself with school sized scissors.  Getting the lines perfectly straight was very tricky, which lead to some wonky readings on the protractor.  Knowing this, the students adjusted and actually were really clever in their problem solving.  I was really impressed with them taking this variable into account and not panicking.

Some students also realized that they didn't actually have to measure all three angles. Knowing two, they could figure out the third.  (I did have them go back and just double check it with the protractor for practice, but I was happy they were making the connection.)







Now, all of this will become a little bulletin board until right before we go on break.  Then, I am planning on taking it down and the scene will become the cover of the holiday card the students take home to their parents.  Win-win.

What fun, standards based projects do you have in store for the next few weeks?