I am constantly AMAZED on how create my students are.  I occasionally try and throw in an assessment that is NOT a test because I have a lot of students who don’t test well.  We just finished up our unit on proving triangle congruence, and I decided that my students would make a proof survival guide for their assessment. I gave them two and a half class periods (the same amount of time I would have spent reviewing and testing)  to work on the project. Many students also worked on it over the weekend and at home.

• Introduction:
  • Provide a table of contents.
  • Introduce your project. Talk about your experience with proofs (if you like them, dislike them, easy, hard).
  • Discuss what you are going to talk about in your guide.
• Model Proofs (with helpful hints)
  • Prove triangle congruence by the following.
    • SSS
    • SAS
    • ASA
    • AAS
    • CPCTC
  • For the “helpful hints” students had to provide an insight into their thought process when solving proofs. If someone was trying to solve their proof what type of things would they have to think about?
• Practice Problems
  • Students had to provide 5 practice problems  for proving triangle congruence. Students also had to provide an answer key for the practice problems.
• What doesn’t work?!
  • In this section, students had to explain what pieces of information wouldn’t work for proving triangle congruence (SSA and AAA). They were required to provide pictures to help their explanation.
• Triangles in the Real world
  • Students had to research where triangles were used in the real world. They also had to research which type of jobs would require knowing properties of triangles and triangles congruence.
• Conclusion/Reflection
  • In this section, students had to provide a thoughtful reflection about the proof process and their project.

I provided my students with these guidelines and also a grading rubric with my expectations. They could present their survival guide in any way they wanted to. I provided poster board, markers, and construction paper during class. A bunch of students created their project on Keynote, pages, and powerpoint. Others created their survival guide in a small notebook, huge poster, FBI secret files, scrapbook pages, and many more!! I’m always so impressed when I have students do projects. I love giving my students the autonomy on assessments. Even the small the choice of choosing how they want to present it inspires so much creativity that I normally don’t see in the classroom!

Below are pictures of a few of the projects and here is my rubric and guidelines for the project! Let me know if you have any questions!