Peek at last week

Last week we went over 2D shapes. I like one activity in the planning given to us through C2C. Students made a triangle and quadrilateral using straws they cut to different lengths and pipe cleaners cut into 5cm pieces. They used sticky tape to attach their shapes to a piece of paper.

 

You can see the pipe cleaners inside the straws. The pipe cleaners bend, creating the shapes. Some students made more than 2 shapes which also worked out well.

Next, they coloured in each shape they made within their larger shape. 

Finally (not shown) they labelled each of the shapes they coloured. Students were able to make pentagons, hexagons, right angled triangles, rectangles, rhombuses and just plain quadrilaterals.  The kids really enjoyed it and since I demonstrated it to the class first, it was a very successful small-group lesson for my first year student teachers to take on. The kids couldn't wait for it to be time for their group to do this activity!

Here's just a random chart....

I teach 'theme' as THE MEssage so we always talk about "The theme, or message, that the author..." Writing it like this helps them remember what 'the theme' means since the letters for 'theme' is spelled in 'THE MEssage'.