Spring SAVY 2017, Day 2- Discovering the Third Dimension

Posted by hallep on Monday, February 6, 2017 in Grade K, SAVY.

Analyze, build, draw, construct, connect – SAVY math is so much fun. This week your mathematicians reviewed 2-D shapes and began exploring the world of 3D solid figures. We began our morning together with a number talk activity, helping these young scholars develop their mental math abilities – plus, geometric subitizing is just fun! We then built on last week’s content of lines and angles. With our own straw protractors, we identified obtuse, right, and acute angles, and found objects in our classroom with these various angles.

We experimented with tangrams, composing and decomposing while interacting with the story of Grandfather Tang. We completed our 2-D anchor chart, and recognized many shapes in our world. We are developing skills to communicate attributes. With the addition of the depth dimension this week, students were able to identify and describe 3-D prisms and pyramids by their faces, vertices, and edges. We analyzed cubes, cones, cylinders, spheres, triangular/rectangular/octagonal prisms.

Throughout our SAVY session, we are considering a few reasoning questions: What shape is most important in construction? Why? How would an architect/engineer/construction worker view it? If the world is 3D, why do we need to know about 2 D shapes?

We are learning about geometry in SAVY, but also learning about ourselves as gifted learners. We are noticing various characteristics of a mathematician. A mathematician: is a problem solver, learns from his/her mistakes, takes risks, can communicate his/her thinking with words and symbols, knows there is more than one way to solve a problem, uses strategies to solve problems, and sees mathematical relationships.