Notes & FAQs

A less demanding topic like this could start the school year, be placed before or after major holidays or saved for the end of the year among other sequencing ideas.  Although this is one of the first chapters in the Big Ideas textbook, it covers one target and a minimal amount of grade level standards. The future topics that this will be built upon do not take place until Geometry. This is also a topic that can be covered within a small amount of time, but can be expanded to provide students with multiple hands on, engaging, and cooperative learning opportunities that naturally fit at the end of a school year with several interruptions. This topic can also be used to review several other key Geometric concepts that are not grade level standards like: angle relationships, triangle angle and side properties.  Thus, the design team choose to place it in the final prescribed unit.

 Both supporting standards in this unit can be embedded in first instruction, explored on their own for depth at the end - time permitting, or both.  For example, verifying congruence & similarity can happen as you define the transformation in question during first instruction or examined on its own.  In addition, the transformation in question could be described with coordinates as well during first instruction or examined on its own.

While the design team choose 8.G.3 as a supporting standard, students sometimes struggle with the abstraction required by describing transformations with coordinates only.  Doing it throughout the unit, will provide students with: a link to conceptual understanding as they name the transformation they just did with & without coordinates, greater depth of knowledge about how to describe a transformation, and the necessary repetition for students to have a chance at obtaining procedural fluency with this skill.  The word transformations is used specifically here as this standard (8.G.3) applies to both rigid transformations and dilations.