3-D Shapes

My goodness, I haven't blogged in a little while!  It was our March (Spring) break and I was just loving spending time at home with my kiddos, but now it's back to work!  We are currently working on 3-D shapes.  While my students were introduced to these shapes that 'pop' out in Junior Kindergarten (Pre-K), I find that they need more experiences with the vocabulary associated with 3-D shapes.  They can remember the descriptions of certain shapes (student talk:  "that looks like a ball!"), but have some difficulty remembering their names.  Here is my Math Wall.  It has a definition explaining what 3-D shapes are, as well as posters depicting each shape.  I have 2 kinds of posters.  One type of poster has a visual picture of the various 3-D shapes, but since the paper is flat, it doesn't do justice to what the shape actually looks like.  So, I also have examples of real world objects that look like each 3-D shape that I like to put in plastic baggies and attach to the Math Wall.  For example, I will put an actual toilet paper roll on the cylinder page, dice on the cube page, etc. (these posters are not pictured because I have to re-laminate the pages since they peeled after laminating! Eeek!  I hate it when that happens!)  These posters are from my Math Posters set. 

Here are our math activities for the week.

We worked on identifying the various 3-D shapes (sorry I didn't get a photo of this activity).

We sorted real world objects by the 3-D shape that they resembled. Then we filled out our recording sheet.

We build tall towers, that could stand and those that would not stand.  Here we talked about flat sides and counted how many flat sides each three dimensional shape had.

This tower stands.

This tower does not stand.

We built a small ramp and made predictions as to whether the shape would roll, slide or do both.  We pushed the solid shapes down the ramp, then discussed and recorded our findings.

Happy Teaching!