Organizing the Internet for Unit Plans

I am working on a unit that covers Area & Perimeter for a Geometry course. Most of the students in my class are in 9th grade, however, there are some older students as well.

This unit will accomplish the following GLCE and METS:

G2.1 Relationships between Area and Volume Formulas
G2.1.1 Know and demonstrate the relationships between the area formula of a triangle, the area formula of a parallelogram, and the area formula of a trapezoid.
G2.1.2 Know and demonstrate the relationships between the area formulas of various quadrilaterals.


3. Have access to and utilize assistive technology tools.

4. Collaborate in content-related projects that integrate a variety of media (e.g. print, audio, video, graphic, simulations, and models) with presentation, work processing, publishing, database, graphics design, or spreadsheet applications.

I have found several websites that will be helpful for this unit. I have created a delicious accounted and organized this websites under the tag geometry. Some of the websites under this tag are not for this unit, but are websites that I have used previously in the class.

The first website I looked at was a Shodor Interactive website called Shape Explorer. I frequently go use Shodor Interactive because it has a lot of websites for discovering Geometry properties. This particular website has the student calculating the area and the perimeter of various shapes. The shapes are on a grid so they can count the squares, or they can apply some of the formulas. The student can type in an answer and website checks the answer. I like this website because it has lots of different shapes instead of the usual square, triangle, rectangle, etc. I also like this website because it keeps a list of all of the areas and perimeters that have been calculated so that you can compare the two measurements.

The next website is a game called Shape Surveyor. This is a game where students calculate either area or perimeter of various shapes. I like this game because you can choose the difficulty at the beginning of the game. This way students who do not feel as comfortable with the material can choose a lower level while other students can do more challenging levels if they please. I do not know how much "fun" this game really is, but it is a good way to check understanding.

I included a website called Area and Perimeter. This website walks students through the properties of area and perimeter and how to find each one. It's very colorful, looks fun, and it has student clicking on different shapes and pictures to learn about area and perimeter. It is a lot more entertaining than reading this information from a book and it is presented in an easy to remember way. It also has students "check" their understanding as the go through the website.

There are two more websites from Shodor Interactive. One of them is Perimeter Explorer and the other is Area Explorer. These websites have some fairly complicated shapes placed on a grid and the object is to find the perimeter or area of each of the shapes. The students can simply count the squares or they can break up the shapes and apply the formulas. There is a button where you can show the outline of the shape. This makes it easy for the student to calculate the area of a larger square and then subtract out the missing pieces. A lot of times students are sent home with homework that asks them to do the same exact thing. I think I would have students calculate the area and perimeter for 10 different shapes on this website as homework instead.