Complementary and Supplementary Angles Notes

I created this complementary and supplementary angles notes page for my trigonometry students as part of our beginning of year review before jumping into the actual trig course content. We wrote the following notes in our trigonometry interactive notebooks.

Full Disclosure: My students hated this notebook page.  You may think hate is a strong word.  But, I’m serious.  You see, I thought I would be creative.  And, I guess I didn’t think my creativity all of the way through.

Class, use a marker, highlighter, or colored pencil to draw a giant C on your notebook page. Inside the C, we were going to take notes on the meaning of “complementary angles.”Then, we were going to turn the C into an S and add notes about supplementary angles.

If they could remember that complementary meant 90 degrees, the S was made up of two Cs, so that would mean 90 degrees times 2 or 180 degrees. Great idea, right?

Well, I didn’t tell my kids what the end product was going to be.  So, they drew some Cs that could not be made into attractive Ss.  Oops.  Their notebook pages were not pretty and perfect now, and it was all my fault.  One of the students in class decided that I had earned myself a “NOT YET” for the day.  Remember my grading scale?  Now, my students are using it to get back at me…  On a side note, they also decided to give the pencil sharpener a NOT YET one day because it made their pencil point too sharp…

Ironically, when I went to put the C/S drawing in my notebook, mine turned out looking not that great either.  I guess that was payback.  I sketched it out several times on scrap paper, but putting marker to notebook paper proved to have less than stellar results.

Here’s some of my students’ pages.

  This student insisted on gluing colored paper over his botched attempt and crafting a perfect C/S combination.