Geometry

Teaching geometry in grade 2 and 3 isn’t all that exciting.  I mean, we have to make sure everyone can identify their shapes, can name a few attributes of those shapes, can manipulate those shapes and make things. It’s not all that interesting when we first get started.  Well, I should say that it isn’t all that interesting to me.  The kids love it!  And they think it’s awesome and the pattern blocks feel nice and everyone feels really confident about themselves during math when we are talking about geometry.  That makes it a great topic to work on during December.  December is a crazy month with a lot of different things happening and emotions running around so it’s nice to have geometry to come back to.

I promise next week I’ll have a lot more to reflect on.  We are moving on to 3D geometry and angles.

We spent some time using the Spheros this week as well.  My friend and I spent some time writing up an instructional unit that involves math and science expectations.  This past week we mostly spent time playing with them.  Luckily one of my students from last year, who is also in my class this year, remembered some important things like how to charge them. There are so many steps involved in using tech!  Even though they aren’t complicated steps they still take up a lot of time, and can cause a lot of trouble if any of them are not followed.  Which is the whole point of learning coding, I suppose.  Try something, fix up the problems, try it again, fix up the problems, repeat.

Like I said – nothing too exciting.  But everything we did this past week set us up for some bigger learning in the next week.  The weeks when we go back and remind ourselves what we already know are quite often as important as the weeks when we are learning new things.