We're learning about 3-D shapes this week. I began by briefly introducing a sphere, cube, cone, and cylinder by holding each one up and telling them the name. Then we began talking about the parts that are found on a solid shape: a face, an edge, and a vertex. I made this anchor chart to help them remember the parts. It has taken us all week to remember the words vertex and vertices. I had one sweetie that remembered regurgitate from studying about penguins and combined it with vertices for "vertitate" and one that called a vertex a Veggie Tale. At least he made the connection that they both started with the letter v. Hehe! I'm really trying to teach them the correct math vocabulary terms and get them to use them more frequently this year than ever before in hopes of helping them become better able to communicate their math thinking. Today we zoned our focus on identifying a cube and composing a cube. Students got to work with a partner and each one got a tray with the materials they needed to build a cube (12 toothpicks and 8 balls of play-doh and a small cube for reference) and they got busy. I thought about leading them through the process step by step and decided to see if they would be able to do it with their partner's help. And I'm so glad I did! Instead of focusing on following step by step directions that I would have been giving them, they used those little brains and figured it out all by themselves or with the help of their friends. Then the play-doh balls started falling apart so the cubes started falling over and the kids started falling out! Thank goodness we had some marshmallows on hand to calm the situation. I think I'll use modeling clay next time to prevent any collapses of the cubes. I had students put stickers on each edge (toothpick). I gave them a small sheet of paper and had them take the stickers off and place them on the paper and count them to see how many edges their cubes had. We also counted the vertices (marshmallows) and faces and recorded how many on our anchor chart of 3-D shapes. We will be adding to our chart and finishing up our unit next week.
