Practicum-Sharing a lesson

Last week I taught a lesson about similarity. We talked about similarity for a few minutes, basically that they needed to be proportional to each other or the same to be similar. After our discussion, I gave them a worksheet where there were plotted points on a graph that created a hat. There was a table on the worksheet that had hat transformations (for example: Hat 2-(x+3, y+2), Hat 3-(.5x, .5y), Hat 4-(3x, 2y), and so on) and the students had to fill in the table by writing in the new points and then graphing them and determining which ones were similar to the original hat. My main strategy was learning by discovery because I basically told them what similarity was and then let them work on the worksheet. We did a lot of class discussions and group discussions (the students are at tables of four people) trying to figure out which hats were similar. The lesson objective was to get students to see what similarity looks like and how to determine which shapes are similar. The things that worked were the group discussions because I didn't give them a whole lot of information and they needed to clarify what similarity was with each other. Some students got it right away and others took time. The worksheet was great because they got to work on some graphing stuff that we had been doing and transformations along with the new lesson we were doing. I checked for understanding through the discussions and walking around and talking to groups. I also did something that my teacher does, which was make students turn in a release question on a small piece of scratch paper. The question was "which hats are similar and why" from the worksheet. They turn it in on the way out and I can see if all of the students understood the lesson and concept of similarity. That allows me to see if I need to clarify anything the next day or if we can move on to the next thing. I really liked this idea. If I were to reteach the lesson, I would changed the transformations to be more different because three of the five hats were the same hat moved into a different position and not a different size so they didn't really get a lot of work with similarity because most of them were exactly the same. I would also have gone over similarity more in the beginning and used more examples because I think that some people were lost early on because I didn't go over it enough.