myGanBlog: Geometry Fun

Geometry Fun

Morah Katie: A quadrilateral is a 4 sided shape with 4 angles.

What do you think quad means?

Augie: 4.

We discovered that the floor on the way to the playground is covered with quadrilaterals and the doors to the social hall are quadrilaterals too!
Judah: The door is 2 rectangles and it makes one big square.
Clara: And the pictures on the wall were all rectangles too.
Judah: Those are all quadrilaterals!

At lunch we discovered more quadrilaterals.

Matan: My napkin has 3 shapes in it. And it is one big shape.

Nora: Hey! There are shapes in my lunch!

Clara: My whole lunch box is one big quadrilateral.

We are discovering that quadrilaterals can be pretty cool shapes.

Clara: (touching the picture of a rectangle) They all have the same type of angle.
Evan: Not all rectangles are squares.
Augie: If you stretch a square out it can become a rectangle, or if you put 2 squares together it becomes a rectangle.
Judah: Some of our tables are squares. And all of these are parallelograms and quadrilaterals.

Morah Katie: There is something special about the angles of squares and rectangles, who remembers the name of the special angle?
Judah: It's the right angle.
Ari: Rectangles have the right angles too.
Clara: A rhombus can't be a square.
Augie: It doesn't have the right angle.
Evan: A rectangle can't be a square.
Matan:Why can't a rectangle be a square?

Judah: A rectangle is a shape with 2 long sides and 2 short sides.
Ari: A square has all the same size sides.
Evan: And a square has right angles.

Matan/Lochlan: Morah Katie what shape is this?

Morah Katie: How many sides does it have?

Matan: 4.

Matan: So it's a rectangle?

Morah Katie: Let's measure it.

Morah Jillian brought us a ruler and we discovered that sides were each 6 inches long.

Morah Katie: What do we know about shapes with the same size sides?

Matan: It's a square? It's a square.

Morah Katie: Yeah, it's a square.

Evan: A rhombus can be a diamond.

Ari: They have the same size sides like squares but they aren't squares.

Judah: Rhombuses don't have right angles. But rhombuses are still quadrilaterals.

Moving on to Circles

Morah Katie: Please tell me something about circles.
Abram: Well there can be solid circles that roll, and those are called spheres.
Judah: A circle can make a pie if you slice it, or a pizza.
Matan: Half a circle is a semi-circle.
Maya: Ovals are like circles.
Augie: Ovals are just squashed a little up top.
Morah Katie: What is an ellipse then?
Judah: The squished circle.

We know that spheres are a type of geometric solid.
They have surface area (sides that could be painted), and volume (stuff inside).
Ari and Matan brought a honeydew melon for snack.
Its shape was an ellipsoid, a ....
Judah: Squished sphere.
I rolled it back and forth, as well as trying to roll a paper circle. The melon rolled better.
But what would happen if we sliced the melon into circles?
I slowly and carefully began to slice the ends off, and after a few slices we got a few good circular pieces, but they did not roll.

Morah Katie: Why are the circle slices of honeydew not rolling?
Augie: Because they are just circles, they aren't the whole melon, they aren't the solid.
Judah: It's thin like the paper.
Morah Katie: What type of circles can roll?
Matan: Tires are circles that roll.
Morah Katie: Why?
Abram: Because there is more of them to roll on. They are bigger. Not just paper.

Morah Katie: What about cylinders?

Augie: They have circles on them.

Morah Katie: Cylinders are geometric solids that have two flat circles on the ends of a curved middle section. Do we have any in our classroom?

Judah: We have some block cylinders to build with.

Morah Katie: Keep your eye out for other cylinders.