Exploring Interior & Exterior Angles of Polygons

I’ve always had my students draw in the lines and explore the interior and exterior angles of a polygon, but they struggle with drawing the lines. Many students try to draw lines from every angle to every other angle and you end up with a spiderweb mess. We also spend so much time on the lines that we lose focus of the pattern that develops. During a PD when we were talking about students questions and exploration, a colleague suggested letting student cut out the angles on the exterior of a polygon and put them together. Well, if you’ve been around my blog long enough you know I am NOT a fan of cutting paper. So I created the exterior angle exploration during our session. It allowed the same exploration as the paper, but was possibly even more visual. Our team LOVED it.  I went on to create the interior angles exploration also. The purpose of this one is to spend time on exploring the pattern and not on the drawing of the actual lines.

If you use this exploration, please let me know. Make sure you put in in Google Classroom with make a copy for each student.