Hey all,
Nothing fancy here, especially if you check out almost any other math blogs regularly. I just made my first foldable, so I thought I’d put it out there.
I haven’t decided whether to have the blue images on the printout or to have the students make their own. Perhaps I should leave at least one blank for them.
And when unfolded:
The inside could be entirely blank. Certainly the definitions wouldn’t be there already. Perhaps I could have the same pictures from the outside (if I kept them on there) and leave the lines of symmetry off, for the students to figure out. And the numbers wouldn’t be there either.
(I’m just learning how to put pictures in my posts, so I’m trying medium and full size to see which looks better when I post this. Having checked out the “first draft” I’d say full size definitely wins.)
I created this using Excel. I was fairly comfortable with that, but I am open to other suggestions.
Foldables seem most often to be on the right-side page of folks’ INBs, but we’re using this for the left side, having already taken notes on Reflection Symmetry. I could see using this during the original note-taking though. But I’m not sure what I would put on the left page afterward. Any advice here would be welcome as well.
I have seen these in many places, but I should say that the most inspiring site for me, with regard to foldables in particular, has been the brilliantly-titled Math = Love. Check it out. That is the work of a first-year teacher, no less. I’d be horribly embarrassed to hold my entire first year up to her first few weeks. (That general idea will be the subject of another post very soon.)
Update: Here’s the Excel file itself, for you to use or adapt to your own purposes. I made two pages, with side 1 and side 2 flipped (if you look at it you’ll see what I mean, I hope). Acually, it looks crummy on Scribd, but I tried downloading it as an Excel file and it came out fine. You can print it double-sided and get two foldables out of every 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Two of the unusual fonts are “44 Font shadow” and “Candy Stripe BRK”, both from 1001 Free Fonts, under the Comic category. The other one is “a song for jennifer bold”, which was the third one down on the home page of 1001 when I was there earlier today. I’m not sure what category it is under.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/105358109/Reflection-Symmetry-foldable
Have fun!
It's all math. 
Thanks for the mention! Seeing it definitely made my morning…
And, I love your foldable. Using the back of each door for the number of lines of symmetry – genius! I’ll definitely be showing this to the geometry teacher at my school.
Keep up with the blogging! I can’t wait to see what you create next.
Not get into an endless recursion here, but making your day makes *my* day. 🙂
It’s certainly exciting if one of the “famous” math bloggers notices you, but I suspect most of us new bloggers are going to grow our networks by finding other 2G math bloggers, so I’m thrilled that you stopped by.
I have been checking out tons of foldables on your site and a few others. My main concern at the moment is that I don’t end up churning out essentially the same one over and over, to the point where the students tire of them (or I do). That said, I haven’t even used this one with my students so I have no idea what the reception will be like. I remain optimistic.
Well, back to work on preparing for the coming week!
Awesome first foldable! For things that I want the students to know, I have typed up and they have to cut and glue in correct spot. Then it’s matching and manipulative and not just “done”. I always let them either draw a picture or find an example in a magazine or online.
Keep on working! I use PowerPoint to create mine and then save as PDF.
I like the idea of the kids having to cut out and match up the items for the foldable.
For what it’s worth, I did remove a lot of what you see above before printing them out, as I suggested in the caption to the second picture. And I left the last one (lower right) blank, with only a 3 inside the flap, so that they had to come up with a figure with three lines of symmetry. I liked throwing that at them, because I didn’t give them any examples of three before, but I also love your idea of suggesting that they look for an example in a magazine or somewhere. Maybe I could leave another flap blank and have them do that (next time). I bet that would totally increase their ownership of the idea of symmetry.
Thanks for the great ideas, Jennifer!
This IS a really great idea. I never knew it was as simple as making a document on excel and then cutting it. Nice!
A lot of folks seem to work from a completely blank piece of paper, or just one with some lines on it to cut. I’m not quite sure how they get all the information to the students that they want on there, except for going over the whole thing step by step. And that feels like a lot of class time.
My next two foldables are perhaps somewhere between this one and the start-from-nothing sort. I want to get them up soon, but this is a busy week for me, with Open House at my son’s school, my daughter’s school, and my school. (All different places, of course.)