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5-6 year olds: Shape forms inquiry (Chevalier)

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5-6 year olds: Shape forms inquiry (Chevalier)

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This shows some students doing a STEM station during our 100th day of school. As you can see, they had a prompt, "What can you create using pattern blocks?" Because this was kind of broad, it was left up to the children whether they working collaboratively or independently while at the same station. At the point of this picture, they were working independently, using different systems for choosing which blocks they selected. One student selected only the cubes, while another focused on the spheres, and a third sought out the cylinders. A fourth student used both 2D and 3D shapes to create what he eventually called a robot.

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Here he tells what does he draw and how many shapes and which shapes there are in the picture.

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When I looked into the examples you share, I am looking forward to share it with my colleagues. I see a long journey for us to adopt more inquiry based and child initiated approaches for mathematics.

Those are examples from different classes but the same activity which is now going on in the school with 5 years group. I am not happy with this activity because I feel like we limit the way children thinks. :(

Here teachers focused on geometrical shapes. The activity started with teachers’ questions for example “What does it look like? A rectangular or a circle? Can you point something rectangular etc.”  And then learners tried to use geometrical shaped cut papers to make an artwork.

They continue with counting how many shapes they used.

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Children went on a shape hunt and found many shapes. Next day they found some more shapes and decided to color the ones on the floor. 

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Children went on a shape hunt and found many shapes. Next day they found some more shapes and decided to color the ones on the floor. 

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We built towers and counted how many blocks we used.

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We built towers and counted how many blocks we used.

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Children found a fun way to play with tires, so we explored the properties of shapes, some can roll and others can not. 

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Children found a fun way to play with tires, so we explored the properties of shapes, some can roll and others can not. 

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We went fishing for numbers, we recorded the numbers we caught

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We went fishing for numbers, we recorded the numbers we caught

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We found numbers around school and had a go at writing numbers.

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Maths investigations

While inquiring into the unit "Sharing the planet" children went on a walk around the school to see what living things and nonliving things we can find. We collected the data and rerecorded our findings.

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While inquiring into the unit "Sharing the planet" children went on a walk around the school to see what living things and nonliving things we can find. We collected the data and rerecorded our findings.

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The children are interviewing one of the school cooks

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One of the questions that the children brought to the interview

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The mini-cafeteria made by the children based on their observation

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The children are pretending to be a care-taker

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The thank you cards that the children made for school staff

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When we explored the unit of inquiry 'We are a part of school community', we decided to explore our school to see what and who we have in the school. I worked with small groups of 4-5 children per time, I asked them to lead me around the school, so the children had to communicate to decide where to go and see. I provided the children observation sheet to document anything they find interesting while we had the school tour. They found many people, places, signs, things around the school. Based on what they found and their interests, we decided to interview teachers, caretakers, school cooks, and school counsellor to get to know more about them. We made questions in groups and interviewed them with the questions that were brought up from the children. We figured out what their roles are and why they are in school. The children made mini working places of those staff with cardboards based on their observations from their visit. The children also made the cards to bring them to the school staff to express our appreciation. It was a fabulous experience for the children, and for myself as well, the experiences were full of rich mathematical skills and learnings especially with data collecting and handling.

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Earlier in the school year we covered our unit on data handling. One of the experiences we did as a class together was creating a tally chart of which mini beast was our favourite. With the class, I modelled the structure of the chart, with both pictures and labels of the options, and we discussed tally marks and what they looked like (four with a line through it was 5 etc). From this experience, nearly every child continues to this day to develop their own chart for various purposes; to identify what people prefer to eat, favourite games, what they want to eat from the drama centre and so on. Some have moved on to using strings of letters or phonetic spelling, but all continue to use the lines as a mark of quantity. Some will write the number underneath the lines once finished. This is a favourite past time. They enjoy interaction with others (it allows for great language development opportunities- especially for English language learnings) and they love clipboards! In this photo, the work was being done individually.
Personally, I appreciate the three stages described in the scope and sequence; constructing, transferring and applying meaning. We, through our observations and learning experiences, need to be aware of the stages our children are working through and with which outcomes/concepts.

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This was started by one boy but was played by a small group. The boy brought out the page with numbers, blank spaces and shapes at the right side. He explained that we need to find these shapes and the first to find the shape wins and gets their name written on the line. As you can see it was rigged by Noah.