Shapes

We are continuing to explore and sort different shapes in room 5a. At level 1 geometry the students
have to work on sorting shapes based on one feature - size, colour, shape, etc. The activity shown above came from an idea I saw on Pinterest and the students had to find classroom objects and sort them into specific shapes.

They really enjoyed this activity and allowed us to have a discussion about the difference between a square and a rectangle. As you can see from the pictures above, they didn't manage to find anything in the classroom which was triangular.

We also worked on a shape identifying activity called 'Roll a Robot'. Again this activity came from something I saw on Pinterest. Students have to roll a dice and each number relates to a shape on the robot which they colour in. Here is the worksheet I created for my class. 

Counting Down

Today my maths group were working on explain everything on the iPads to demonstrate their ability at counting down.

Paige and Tristan have showed off their skill here.

This strategy is where you count down from the largest number to solve a subtraction problem, rather than counting them all. So 11-5 = (10,9,8,7,) 6!

The whole group showed seem really good skills on the iPads which was good, but are still developing their understanding of the counting down strategy. Check back next week to see how the group is doing!

Radishes

Two weeks ago we read the book The Gardener's Maze in room 5a. During the week the students had been learning about the letter r, so as a follow up activity we became gardeners and planted some radish seeds.
First we decorated our cups so we would know which cup belonged to which student, then popped five holes in the bottom. Popping holes in the bottom with a pen was very tricky and a few children popped some extra large ones!
We filled the cups with soil and put 3 tiny radish seeds in.
They have been growing for 2 weeks and are ready to go home and be planted in the children's gardens. I chose to use paper cups so they could just plant the whole thing in the garden to keep the radishes as undisturbed as possible.

iPad Shape Hunt

On Friday the juniors were learning about shapes and I decided to incorporate some iPad work into this lesson with a shape hunt.
The students had a range of experience with iPads, but still needed a lot of guidance in completing the activity. We worked around this by buddying the children together with a more experienced student taking the lead.
We used the app Pic Collage to collect photographs of things around the room that were circular. The students and I felt that the activity was a great success and they all easily identified things in the class which were the right shape.