3D or not 3D, that is the question.

Dear Parents,

I've been remiss in taking photos this past week!

First of all, a big thank you to Liz, Linnaea's mom, who came in to support our Earth Day community clean up on Friday. Students were so excited to be helping out and we had a good conversation about the types of litter we noticed during our community walk.

Our current focus has been 3d solids. It's a natural extension of the sculptures that students were working on with Diane, Felix's mom in my last blog post.

It's a hexagonal prism, but he doesn't know it yet.

Students have been experimenting with making different 3D shapes with flat plastic shapes and then identifying them. We've also had straws and popsicle sticks with plasticene at the playdoh centre, where some are making shapes and others are making space ships or birthday cakes.

This is a pirate ship, of course.

Most students can tell the difference between a pyramid and a prism (The first is made with a single base linked by triangles, the second is made with two bases joined by rectangles).

The great pyramid

Many different types of pyramids and prisms are being made. Students have surprised me by remembering to name things by their bases (e.g. triangular prism vs. pentagonal prism) and seem to delight in the nomenclature. Design problems like some of the triangles being too small to join at the top of a hexagonal pyramid have been interesting. So has the student drive to make ever stranger shapes and have them identified. I learned what a hexahedron, or should I say, Triangular bipyramid, was.  Our next steps are beginning to count the sides and corners.

Students have also been playing with the nets of cubes, square-based pyramids, and cones by drawing on paper versions of them before cutting them out and pasting them together. The idea of a net is still a hard concept for many to grasp, but we plan to turn our collected shapes into a class mobile.

In conclusion, there will be more pictures next week.

Sincerely,

Ms. Goegan