Shape Zoo U.S.A

I'm posting this as part of the Monday Math Blog Hop from love2learn2day. I know it's Tuesday however, yesterday, I taught my lesson for my formal observation.  As an added bonus, my Assistant Principal asked If I minded if she also video tape the lesson!  ahhhh--was what I was thinking, but of course I said yes.  Considering yesterday was a full moon, my class did amazing.  I couldn't take pictures while they were working, but I have some after shots of their work!  They asked great questions, gave great answers and were really thinking critically. Which was awesome. If you want to try this lesson, I have it up for free on TpT here: Geometry Introduction Lesson

Here we meet Miss Poly Gon! (I actually made 2, so the one I used with my class you can see below)



Here is Shape Zoo USA.  Each table group received a bag of shapes to sort as a team. They came up to the board and justified their reasoning: stating # of sides and #of vertices.

Ok I know It's upside down!! but, if you look carefully, you can see that they labeled each shape, wrote the # of sides and vertices, traced the shape and identified the vertices with dots. That was actually a student generated idea. I did not explicitly teach them to do this. One of my little smarties was drawing the dots. I thought it was such a great idea, so I showed the class on the document camera.  They all started doing it in their Shape Field Journals as well.

Today we labeled Miss Poly as a class and finished up our shape Walk.  The class really had fun, and best of all so did I. I forgot I was being observed and video taped and really got into the lesson.