Are you getting ready to tackle angles with your students? Angle concepts can be tricky for students. Hands-on, engaging activities help students master the concepts and have fun while doing them. Here are some of my favorites.
Start with the basics
Start by introducing the basic concepts of angles. Wherever two rays share a common endpoint, angles form. Next, introduce right angles, acute angles, obtuse angles, and straight angles. Guided notes make excellent references for students. Create a page that includes the names of the angles and their definitions. Have students design posters explaining the different angles and hang them in the classroom.
Building angles
Hands-on practice with concepts helps student mastery. Give students straws and twist ties and let them explore making angles. Straws represent rays. Place a twist tie into the end of a straw, leaving part of the twist tie out. Add a second straw to the twist tie. The straws represent two rays connected at an endpoint. Students form angles by moving the straws.
As students get better at recognizing and forming angles, challenge them to form specific angles. Make it into an game by having groups work together to form angles to a specific degree measurement. Here’s how:
- Call out an angle measure.
- Each student forms the angle with the straws.
- Students trace the angles and measure them.
- The student with the angle closest to the real measurement wins a point.
Measuring angles
Before students can accurately measure angles, they need to recognize and categorize them. Once my students have had opportunities to look at angles and sort them, we create our own. I ask the students to use a ruler to draw 5 or 6 lines on a sheet of paper.
Next, students label the angles they created on the paper. The last step is measuring the angles. Students use a protractor to measure the angles.
angle scavenger hunt
All students love scavenger hunts! Bring them outside and challenge them to locate a specific set of angles. I ask my students to find an example of a right angle, a straight angle, an acute angle between 10° and 45°, an acute angle between 45 and 90°, and an obtuse angle.
My students take pictures using a tablet and record their angle measurements in a notebook. We upload the images to a Google slide and add the angle measures. Students could also sketch the angles they find and record their measurements.
angle art
My students love doodle art challenges. I created a set for them to complete that uses an angle instead of a doodle. Students identify the type of angle and then use their imagination to turn the angle into something else. Grab it here if you want to try it out!
Measuring angles can be tricky, but it’s a lot of fun. Let me know if you try out any of these activities.
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