What's Going On? November 14th through November 18th

Unit 5: Triangle Relationships

This week we will start our fifth unit for the year.  During this very quick unit, we will focus on properties and relationships that exist within in a single triangle.  We will only have four lessons that go along with this unit and students should expect a summative on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving break.  

During this unit, we will focus on four different learning targets:

• 1c: I can make formal geometric constructions, including points of concurrency.
• 1e: I can prove theorems about congruent triangles.
• 
  2c: I can write equations of lines.
• 3c: I can compute, solve and analyze geometric shapes and measures.

Students will learn about different points of concurrency that exist within triangles. While learning about these points, students will write equations for altitudes, perpendicular bisectors, and medians of a triangle. We will also use a free app called "Geometry: Constructions Tutor (Lite)" in order to work more with constructions. Students should have this app installed for Monday's class.

We will start off the week talking about angle bisectors in triangles. We will learn about a point known as the "incenter" that allows us to draw a circle that just touches all three sides of a triangle.

Next, we will talk about perpendicular bisectors in triangles.  We will learn about a point known as the "circumcenter" that allows us to draw a circle that passes through all three vertices of the triangle.

We will talk about medians in triangles.  We will do an activity where students find the "centroid" of a triangle.  This is the magic "balance point" of the triangle.

Lastly, we will talk about altitudes.  Students will construct an "orthocenter" of a triangle which is where all three altitudes of the triangle intersect.