Walking down the fifth grade hallway at Heritage Elementary, one soon encounters a miniature city. Taped on the floor are houses, restaurants, stores and even a mall, and all are connected with one central roadway. Look a little closer and something unique is revealed about this town: every building is made of and named after polygons. Welcome to “GEOtown.”
“I wanted to create a lesson that captivates and engages my students,” said fifth grade teacher Joe Parthemore, adding that the geometry lesson is designed to help students master the fifth grade standard about being able to classify two-dimensional shapes.
The project begins with planning and understanding, since students have to be able to know that “a square can be a rectangle or also a rhombus,” according to Parthemore, “and I try to take something that can be complicated and make it easy for them to understand.”
Once students mastered the concepts, they partnered as collaborative teams in designing different areas of the town, all based on geometric shapes, and gave buildings fun names such as “Trapazoid Trampoline Park,” “Pentagon Pet Shop” or “Geo Lemon.”
Beyond a math lesson, they were also learning vocabulary. For example, fifth grader Isabell Price explained that the roof of her GEOtown house was shaped like a “rhombus, which is a four-sided polygon with no right angles.”
Across town at Bransford Elementary, students were also shaping up their geometry skills. After studying New York artist Aakash Nihalani, known for his 3D installations made with tape, students designed their own geometric artwork along the school’s hallways. They also measured length, width and height of the shapes to learn about volume.
Back in GEOtown, the project is helping students see math in a new way.
“At first I didn’t like math, but now it’s easier,” fifth grader Enza Marcaccio said. “This has been one of my favorite projects.”
For Parthemore, it’s more than a math lesson.
“They’re learning the concepts, but I also hope that years from now they remember what a great experience they had in fifth grade.”