Friday November 15

During conferences a lot of you asked what math looks like in kindergarten. The first part of the year we focused a lot on building number sense in numbers to 10. However, until the holidays we will be building, describing, sorting, and naming 2D and 3D shapes. This is such an engaging unit and I believe it teaches geometry in a deep way that focuses on understanding and not memorization.

Below, the kids built polygons with either 3, 4, 5, or 6 sides. They learned several things from this activity! First, it doesn't have to look like a common pentagon or hexagon to be one! A shape can look many different ways, but it's still a hexagon if it has 6 straight sides and 6 corners. They also learned that shapes with lines dividing them are really just two shapes side by side.

On another day, we built circles using play-dough, sticks, and cubes. We figured out that not only is a circle a curved shape with no straight sides or corners, but that also it's a circle because the "lines" coming from the center (otherwise known as the radius!) are all the same size.

In this picture they placed a cube at each end of the sticks so that they would all be an equal distance from the middle.

And in this picture, they removed the center and the sticks to see if a true circle remained!

After doing some 2D shape work, we used what we knew to try building 3D shapes with the same materials. It was much harder than we thought it would be, but many kiddos persisted and ended up succeeding!

In other building news, look at these two partnerships' solutions to our Science Center challenge. They were the first ones to figure out how to use the velcro blocks to make a bridge that would be strong enough to hold all three billy goats! Way to go, teams!

Lastly, thank you for your participation in our Kindergarten Magic Guess My Food game today! All week we discussed different food traditions at home. Finishing the week with the game was a great way to tie it all together. (Also… can I come to your house for dinner?!)