Lesson Four: Memorable PowerPoints

This past year as a 7^th grade math teacher I had to work with the new Common Core Standards.  A part of those standards Is a compacted curriculum for 7^th grade students that wish to take algebra 1 in 8^th grade and count it towards high school credit.  As such I taught an exploratory class with my pre-algebra students for a 9 week period over geometry.   

   One particular PowerPoint that I and another teacher from the other team worked on was a presentation on surface area.   This presentation was for student in the geometry class and due to the time constraints I wasn’t going to be able to spend a week on surface area so we set up the PowerPoint in a very simple manner and in a way that students wouldn’t feel intimidated to know and memorize everything.  

    One of the things I was most proud of was the beginning slide where we introduce the surface area formula but then we flash in a bright yellow box that says ‘ Wait…You thought you were going to have to memorize this?!?’.  The students had already been learning about area of regular and compound shapes and we didn’t want to bog them down with learning all the formulas for surface area as well.  That would come in time with use.  The students got a little laugh out of it and I could tell a noticeable difference in their mood when we worked on the rest of the presentation.  The next slides were very neat with our prisms in color and tables spread out to help them step-by-step so they can understand what is going on and why they are correct.  After this presentation surface area wasn’t nearly as difficult as I had done it in years before.

   There are a few things I would do differently however.  The PowerPoint doesn’t really go into much detail on how the surface area formula works and there aren’t any pictures of real objects where it would be necessary to find surface area for.  If you can find ways that can prove to them they may actually need to know the content it can be very beneficial.  I’m always the kind of teacher where I don’t want to show students and then tell them to do it just because I say so.  I want them to know why these practices work.  I also would have inserted other questions that involved objects other than rectangular prisms.  I could also have students collaborate to make their own 3d objects and dimensions and then pass them on to another group to solve for the surface area. 

   As stated before the students took the presentation well.  It didn’t have many flashy animations or wild colors, or other artwork that would take away from the content.  The students liked the tables and I would have them fill out the tables on the board as we went so I could get more student involvement.  I used PowerPoints on a regular basis to transition from bell work to content for the day and to have students think about essential questions for our objectives.