It’s time for Geometry in 6th grade once again.  I love this time of year because Geometry is so much fun!  Each year, I have my student create Geometry Booklets.  They are half sized booklets that we make from folding a small stack of 8.5″x11″ copy paper in half.  The booklets are a quick way to review past topics without spending days reteaching the topics or taking notes.  Each Geometry lesson I teach goes into the booklet and then they make a wonderful Cubism cover in Art Class.  Taking notes in the booklets are a change from their usual math notebooks.  Change is good in the last weeks of the year to keep the student’s interest up during “Spring fever”.

Every year I jump into the Geometry books, but this year, I wanted to know what they remembered from 5th grade (as I have students from multiple elementary schools) before I started teaching.  After their last test I gave them a Google Survey asking them if they knew certain geometry definitions.  I had them answer yes if they were certain that they knew the definition, and no if they did not know if (or even if they weren’t sure).  The form looked like this.

Google forms will display the results in pretty pie charts like this.  However, I prefer spreadsheet summaries, so I tallied up my own results.  I counted the results with a CountIf in Google Forms and then conditionally formatted with color to show me at a glance what I really needed to focus on.  The results looked like this.  The red 20 means that 20 of my 32 students did not know the formula for the circumference of a circle.  The green 0 for parallelogram means that all of my students know what a parallelogram is.

I was surprised that so many students did not remember the area formulas (I had similar results for the areas of triangles and rectangles).  I thought many more students would have remembered the area formulas from 5th grade.  This shows me I will not only need to focus on the area formulas, but more frequently reinforce if I want my students to really learn and then remember these formulas.  Area is such an important topic throughout all “areas” of mathematics.  🙂