What's Going On? November 25th and 26th

It's going to be a short week this week with only two days of school.  We will have a "Monday" schedule on both days, so we'll be seeing all of our classes.

We will be continuing our study about the points of concurrency in a triangle.  We'll look more a the incenter, circumcenter, centroid and orthocenter.  We'll also talk about the Euler Line.  We'll be using the Geometry Construction Lite App on our iPads to construct some of these points of concurrency.  We'll also do an hands-on activity while we find the centroid of a triangle.

I hope that everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving Break.  Take some time to enjoy your families and reflect on what you're thankful for.  Happy Thanksgiving!

What's Going On? November 18th through November 22nd

Wrapping Up Unit 5: Triangles

This week in Honors Geometry we will be wrapping up our fifth unit on triangles.  During Monday's short class (we will have Academic Excellence on Monday) we will talk about proving two overlapping triangles congruent.  We'll need to make sure that we remember the reflexive property for this, which states that something equals itself.  We will then spend a day on reviewing the material for the unit and take our Unit 5 Summative Assessment (90%).

Our test will cover the following items:

• Triangle Sum (angles = 180 degrees)
• Properties of an Isosceles Triangle
• Triangle Inequality (can we always make a triangle with the given side lengths?)
• Midsegments
• Triangle Congruence Shortcuts (SSS, SAS, ASA, SAA, and HL)
• Proving Triangles Congruent

If you would like some extra help, be sure to come see me!  I am available on most days before and after school.  Just let me know when I can expect you!

At the end of the week, we will transition into our next unit where we will talk about points of concurrency in a triangle.  If you have not downloaded the "Geometry Construction Lite" app, yet make sure that you have it by the end of the week!

What's Going On? November 11th through November 15th

Unit 5: Triangle Congruence

At the end of last week we took a short formative on the properties of triangles which covered the following topics:

• Angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees
• Properties of isosceles triangles
• Isosceles triangles have two congruent sides and two congruent angles
• Triangle Inequality
• The sum of any two sides of a triangle must be greater than the third side
• Midsegments of Triangles
• A midsegment of a triangle connects the midpoints of two sides of a triangle
• A midsegment of a triangle is equal to half the length of the third side and is parallel to the third side.

If you have any questions about the first formative please see me ASAP.  We want to make sure that we get the basics down before we start to apply the properties in our proofs.

This week we will continue our study of triangle congruence shortcuts.  We will learn about the "good" conjectures which prove that two triangles are congruent.  We will also learn about the "bad" conjectures that are not sufficient for proving triangles congruent.

Our "good" conjectures are:

• SSS
• SAS
• ASA
• SAA/AAS
• HL Right Triangle Congruence

Our "bad" conjectures are:

• AAA
• SSA (think of it backwards!)

We will have a short formative about the different triangle congruence shortcuts before we move into proofs.  We will continue our study of two column proofs to prove that two triangles are congruent.

Next week we will have our summative assessment on the properties of triangles and proving triangles congruent.

What's Going On? November 4th through November 8th

Unit 5: Triangle Congruence

This will be kind of a strange week.  We have our sophomore students participating in WKCE testing Tuesday through Friday from 7:20-10:00am.  That means that our regular school day will start at 10:05 and we will have a different schedule.  This week we will meet with each class three times.  Click here to view the schedule for the week.

This week we'll be looking at the properties of midsegments of triangles and we'll determine if we can always make a triangle with given side lengths.  We'll see a very short formative assessment on
properties of triangles to make sure that we're ready to move on to the triangle congruence shortcuts. If everything goes well with our short formative assessment, we'll start talking about shortcuts to show that triangles are congruent.  This is laying the ground work for what's coming later in the chapter: writing two column proofs to show that two triangles are congruent.