The "What is and What Isn't" Game

I recently chatted with a college math professor. He mentioned that there was one thing elementary teachers could do that would help secondary teachers out tremendously. My ears perked up and I waited in anticipation to what we could do better, faster, higher, or harder  to help our students prepare for college.

It turns out, that in a standardized math test given to secondary students, one question that many students "bombed" was a quite simple question about pentagons. When shown many different examples of pentagons, students were asked to identify which ones were, indeed, pentagons. So many students answered incorrectly that it came to the attention of college professors.

It would seem that somewhere along the line, students learned that a pentagon has five sides and looks like a house. Relying on a past visual experience, students began to correlate a pentagon to a familiar shape instead of using the properties of a pentagon to identify it.

A 3rd grade activity I use to make sure students are focusing on the properties of shapes and not just the memorizing the visual picture.

Obviously we need to spend more time and bring out more examples while focusing on the properties of these shapes, but it got me to think about other instances in which students need more exposure to concepts and properties so they can reason more effectively.

This was the beginning of the "What is and What Isn't" game we do in the classroom. I have extended it beyond geometric shapes. Here are some areas that students have to identify and explain their thinking:

"What is and What Isn't" an improper fraction?
"What is and What Isn't" a mixed number?
"What is and What Isn't" an obtuse/acute/right angle?
"What is and What Isn't" a ruler?
"What is and What Isn't" a quadrilateral?
"What is and What Isn't" a 2-D and 3-D shape?
"What is and What Isn't" subtraction and multiplications strategies that work?
"What is and What Isn't" an equivalent fraction?