I can't believe it's been weeks since my last blog post! The beginning of school this year was a little hectic. You see, our school was switching over from carpet flooring to tiles, and the classrooms were not quite ready the week that we went back. I have to say I actually had chest pains worrying about getting my classroom done in time for our kindergarten orientation. Seriously! Am I obsessive-compulsive or what?
So anyway, Monday is going to be my 14th day of school, and I wanted to share with you all some things that really worked thus far. We started off the year with positions and shapes. The books in the carousel above are some of my favorite shape books ever. I have previously blogged about two of the books, Mouse Shapes and Grandfather Tang's Story.
Four songs that worked really well for me this year, where the students can practice drawing the shapes in the air while they're learning about them, are:
"Waltz of the Triangles" by Newbridge Education
"I'm a Circle" by Jack Hartmann
"I'm a Square" by Jack Hartmann
"Circles" by Miss Jenny
I really listened to my students this year talking about what they like. Robots seemed to be something that they were interested in. Also, my class is very boy-heavy. So, taking that into consideration, I cut out shapes and had the students create their own shape robots. You would not believe the creativity! The children were saying their robots were space aliens, vampire robots (I have no idea!), Barbie robots, and princess robots. I really thought this was a great project to do at the beginning of the year, because it really got my ESOL students talking to each other about their shapes, what they were creating, etc. I was also able to find out who could say the names of the shapes that their robots were made out of. Here are two examples of the robots that they made:
I just gave each student a Ziploc bag of a variety of shapes. Another teacher in my school just put the shapes on the table without giving each child a bag. The one tip that I have for you is to keep the activity to the four basic shapes (circle, square, rectangle, triangle) because you can still make a great person-like creature with them. The Common Core State Standard for this project was:
CCSS.Math.Content.K.G.B.6: Compose simple shapes to form larger shapes. For example, “Can you join these two triangles with full sides touching to make a rectangle?”
Finally, here is a freebie that you can use along with this robot project, to make a connection to reading:
I hope you like this freebie and can use it with your kiddos. I'd love to know what you're doing for shape projects!
