by Liana Ponce
Over the last two months I’ve been teaching geometry lessons to the 4th grade classes in my school. We use the Eureka Math curriculum. When it came time to work on angle measurements, I read the lessons and came away feeling there was something missing.
I wanted to students to have a deeper understanding of these geometry concepts and find joy in this work, so I made some big changes while sticking to the sequence of objectives.
I replaced three lessons with some of my own design, borrowing heavily from great resources I discovered which are available for free and credited in the plans. Below you can read about these lessons, the thinking behind them, and access them to use yourself!
Lesson 1, replacing Eureka Math lesson 5 (grade 4, module 4)
Objective: understand a 1-degree angle as 1/360 of a turn. Explore benchmark angles using the protractor.
Guiding Questions: Where did 360 degrees come from? How can we use that full 360 degrees to find benchmark fractions using what we know about angles, multiplication, and division? (no protractor needed!)
Lesson 2, replacing Eureka Math lesson 6
Objective: Use a protractor to measure angles and record the measurements in degrees.
Guiding Question: How can our knowledge of angles help us use protractors as a tool to measure angles precisely?
Lesson 3, replacing Eureka Math lesson 7
Use a protractor to measure angles and record the measurements in degrees.
Guiding Question: How can we use what we know about angles and circles to make estimates of angle measures?
You can find the folder with all lessons for this module here.
Fourth grade students playing Angle Bullseye, a game from the San Francisco Unified School District. Game directions found here!
* Free resources from PARCC, SFUSD, and Eureka Math are referenced in these lessons. None of those organizations endorse or are affiliated with this work. If you use the resources from those sites, please credit appropriately.