Shape Exploration

It's important that kiddos get a lot of hands on time with 2D and 3D shapes before they can do any kind of problem solving with them. I purchased these cute little blocks from Lakeshore. It's a set of 80! Today and tomorrow we'll spend time exploring, making predictions and answering a LOT of questions from Miss Dunker....mostly, "what do you think," and "why do you think that?"

It was funny to me that these three teamed up and were visiting the shapes together. They worked really hard! Here they started at the cubes and stacked them up to make this tower.

Look below! Then they added a pyramid on top. I asked them, "Do you think the pyramid will stack and why?" I get a lot of different answers, depending on where their understanding is....

"It's got a flat base."
"It's a square on one side."
"It's got a side just like the cube."

Then they tried the cylinder and I asked the same question. I got pretty much the same answers. Some kids are comfortable using 3D words such as face and base.

Then they made a prediction that the sphere would not stay. They said this because it was "round, curvy and there is no base or bottom."

This group tried making a domino tower out of rectangular prisms! Cool! They knew that this shape has a flat part or a base.

Here's Gabi working on a tower of cylinders.

This group tried to stack cones. They decided it wouldn't work because of the point.

We'll continue our exploration this week and come back for some problem solving next week!!!