On Monday morning, I visited the Kindergarten and grade one students in Lauren MacLean’s classroom at Blair. The last time I visited the class, we had been looking around the classroom, noticing all the shapes we could see.

This time, we continued our inquiry into how shapes can go together to make new shapes. The students built, created and describe their constructions.

Two students combined the rainbow blocks into one big rectangle. How many rectangles can you see in the rectangle?

The students also noticed lots of shapes in the classroom and how some things, like the door outside, were made up of multiple shapes.

Students that didn’t have the chance to explore with the Osmo Tangram app during my last visit had a try. The app shows increasingly difficult tangram puzzles and the students have to recreate the image using the tangram puzzle pieces. There is lots of discussion about how to combine the pieces together and how to move and flip them as necessary. Great spatial problem solving!

A short Animoto photo video can be viewed here.

The Reggio-inspired geometry math kit will be moving on to another class in January. I wonder what they will learn about shapes!

~Janice