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.