We've been working in our shapes unit for about 2 weeks!
Here are some of the fun things we have been doing with shapes that incorporates math with fine motor work, as well as ELA skills!
PLAY DOUGH!
I can't emphasize enough how important play dough is in a kindergarten classroom!
Each of my students has his/her own container of play dough that they keep in their cubby. If we have a few minutes at the end of a lesson I will have them get their play dough and make something with it pertaining to the lesson.
Here they were 'challenged' to make a circle, square, triangle and rectangle with their dough:
PETE THE CAT!
We had been reading a lot of Pete The Cat books the first week of school.
Although Pete's buttons were all the same shape in the story, we used it as a springboard to talk about different shapes buttons COULD be!
I gave each of them a rectangle piece of paper (About 4x6 size) in 4 different colors.
I gave clues about a shape using its characteristics we had talked about (Ex. I have no straight sides and no corners- who am I? CIRCLE!)
They chose the color they wanted for that shape and drew it using a black crayon- I modeled the 'how to' on the board.
Once they were all drawn, they cut them and glued them to a piece of paper that had this phrase glued to it: '____________'s 4 Groovy Shape Buttons!'
And here they are on display in our classroom!
INTERACTIVE WRITING and SHAPE BOOK
We have been working with the sight words 'a' 'I' and 'see' for the past 3 weeks and are using them during interactive writing.
To connect to math, we made a chart reviewing the shapes we had learned about to display in our classroom as our 'shape' poster!
I had pre-drawn and labeled the shapes.
They identified the shapes and helped complete the sentence using the sight words we had learned.
We them read and completed a shape book!
The students were amazed to see that he sentences they just wrote were the same as the ones in the book!
'We are writers! We are readers!'
MATH JOURNALS
I stared math journals this year and am happy to report that they are going really well!
The students complete them about 3 times a week- depending on how much time we have after each lesson.
They glue the prompt into their books and then complete what it asks them to do while I walk around and date stamp/assist students.
We share our journals with our table friends!
They used their math journals during the interactive writing lesson described above, as well! As we wrote the sentence and read it, they then drew that shape in their journal!
Yesterday completed our shape unit.
I made a quick assessment for both finding, and naming, the shapes we are required to learn (circle, square, rectangle, triangle, hexagon, cube, cone, sphere and cylinder).
This was given whole group:
It shows me at a quick glance who has mastered finding the shapes we learned and who needs a bit more practice and with what shapes.
(BTW it is not an issue of not knowing colors- I had them hold the color I asked for up in the air before coloring and if they didn't have the right color, I helped them find it)
This one was completed while they were coloring their shape book (above). I walked child to child with my shape 'chart' and asked them what each shape was. I marked it on the recording sheet:
If they knew them all, I just put a big check over the paper,
If not, I slashed it.
I noted if they named it a different name (Ex. 'ball' for 'sphere').
I will pull these out when I pull math skill groups to go over shapes for particular students and then re-visit them when it is time for report card assessments. I'll use a different color pen to indicate progress and then share the papers with parents at conferences.
We re-visit solid shapes again in a few months too!
In addition to the activities above, I also made a few shape printables I have used for morning work and math stations.
You can find all the printables, the shape book and my shape assessment pieces here:
(I don't have the Pete the Cat craft label or math journal prompts in here- sorry! Once I have all the math journal prompts for the year made and 'tested' I will be adding them to my TpT Store. For Pete the Cat, I just typed up the header, printed several per page, cut into strips and glued to the top of the paper.)
You can find this FREE reader in my store:
Since Fall is here, this is a perfect craft to review shapes!
And here are a few other shape resources I have:
Hope this helps make your shape unit even more fun!
Until next post,
