Attributes are today's focus!

Wednesday, January 21, 2014

Today, Joe and Linda; two guests from the board office, stopped in to see what was up in grade 3 at St. James the Greater!

Before getting into the activity of the day, we reviewed some of the ATTRIBUTES that we've been looking at over the last couple of days. We've discussed side length, parallel lines, and the different types of angles. In grade 3, they only need to know the right angle, and compare all other angles to it. In our class, we learned about obtuse and acute angles too!

This was their first task:

Here are some of the ways that we sorted our shapes:

The first group, sorted by REGULAR and WEIRD shapes. From this, in our consolidation, we talked about what makes a shape REGULAR and IRREGULAR. Other groups had similar sorting - some had "Shapes I know" and "Shapes that I don't know" or "Awkward and Non-Awkward"

This second solution, went in a bit different direction - Quadrilateral vs. Non-Quadrilateral. We then reviewed all the shapes that we know are quadrilaterals. This lead to a discussion on shapes with 4 sides. 

With the topic of side lengths, another group had 5 groups, all looking at different side lengths.

In the end we created an anchor chart of ways that we can sort our shapes. We determined that the many different ways we sorted the shapes was by the different attributes. This is what we came up with:

Ever have a day where you planned a three part lesson plan, but the first activity takes up the entire lesson! This was one of those days - but I guess that means there was some pretty great discussion!