We started, or actually I started, by creating the flip books using notecards and tape. You can use as many or as few as you need. In our case, we needed 10. One for a cover page, and 9 for the vocabulary words.
I placed the notecards with the lines facing towards me and arranged them so that one card was on top of the first. I decided to space the cards evenly by skipping two lines on the notecard before it. Then I taped it down and continued until all 10 cards were taped and evenly placed.
When you flip the cards over, you will see a long row of notecards with just the white parts of the card visible.
This whole process took me about 30 minutes to make 16 flip books. If you have older students, you can definitely have them create them. I only had about an hour of math time today, so I wanted to the students to have as much time as possible to write the content.
The next step would be having the students write in the vocabulary terms on the small tabs and the title on the big space on top.
Once the students had all of the words on the tabs, I demonstrated how to write the definitions and pictures by flipping each notecard up. We started by doing a ray, line segment and line together as a class. When you flip up that top notecard, you will have a section of lines on top and a white blank space towards the bottom. I had my class write the definitions on the lines and draw examples in the white space.
Once I saw that they understood what to do, they continued and finished the rest of the flip book on their own. We used our math reference books to find the definitions in our glossary.
Overall, I’m very happy with how these came out, and I’m not even kidding, there was about 30 minutes of complete silence while they worked. This doesn’t happen very often. These are going to stay in their math folders and can be used a reference during the unit.
It has been officially the first full week back from winter break, and as always, some students are still on vacation mode. I tried to plan our math pacing out so that I wouldn’t have had to begin a new unit before break, which actually worked out! This week, we started our unit on geometry, which is full of new terms that the students haven’t heard before. I decided to use today, a Friday, to review some of these vocabulary words so I can make sure the students understand before continuing to move on to more complex topics. So….we made math these vocabulary flip book (and shhhh..don’t tell them that they practiced dictionary skills as well)!
