Lesson 4 - Building Quadrilaterals

To encourage your child to have fun on the Web while learning about Building Quadrilaterals, here are some games and interactive activities they can do on their own or in pairs.

Goal

Relate properties of quadrilaterals to their side lengths.

Builds Upon

Student Book pages 202-203

Instructions for Use

Linkage-Strip Quadrilaterals gives your child practice building quadrilaterals with given lengths.

To use Linkage-Strip Quadrilaterals, click the green arrows to select the lengths of each line segments. Position the unconnected line segments by dragging their blue endpoints. When the endpoints meet to forma quadrilateral, the 'Joint Endpoint' button appears. Click it to connect the line segments. Drag the red dots to see if a quadrilateral can be formed. Click 'Disconnect Endpoints' to unlink the line segments.

To fill in the table below the activity, write either "yes" or "no" in the fifth column of the table to indicate whether or not you can make a quadrilateral from those four lengths. Experiment with different sets of lengths. When you build a quadrilateral, see if you can deform it into a different quadrilateral with the same side lengths. When you click "Show Answers," the filled-in table will appear below the problem.

Tangram Quadrilaterals helps your child identify which tangrams are quadrilaterals.

To use Tangram Quadrilaterals, click on a picture at the bottom of the applet, and use all seven pieces to fill in the outline. To move a tangram piece, click on the piece and drag it to the desired location. To select a tangram piece, click on it. To rotate a piece, position the cursor over the shape until a black dot appears at the vertex. Click on the black dot and drag it to rotate. To color a selected piece, click on a colored button on the right. To flip the tangram piece, select it, and click on the flip button (red arrow). Click on the 'reset' button to clear the space.