To prepare for the activity, I bought a few things…īaby Utensils (hey, it’s what I had on hand!) There are many ways to do this activity and you can modify it however you’d like, but I am going to share with you how I’ve done it. Before asking students to create hierarchies using shapes, I decided to introduce hierarchies using objects they were familiar with and were easy to talk about! Activity #2: Hierarchy of Chips The reason this is tricky is that most students don’t know what a hierarchy is or how it functions. Hierarchies of shapes may sound fancy and look complicated, but it is really just creating groups based on characteristics. Once they’ve refreshed their brains on what attributes make figures unique, they’ll be ready to begin classifying shapes and creating hierarchies. Once they were done at a bag, they could go to another open bag that was different from the one they just completed.īy the end of the activity, students will have explored at least 4 different figures and had time to really discuss and focus on the properties of each shape. Students weren’t allowed to pull the shapes out of the bag to look at them until both partners had finished one side of the activity sheet. They may comment on the angles of the shape as well. For example, students might feel the trapezoid and notice that it has four sides, only one pair of parallel sides, and that two of the sides feel about the same length. Once the activity begins, students will travel to the stations in pairs and reach in the bag to feel each shape in order to answer the questions on their activity sheet. Now place these bags around the room to create stations. Then, place two different shapes (maybe a trapezoid and a triangle) in each of the bags labeled Mystery Bag B. Place two different shapes (for example, a parallelogram and a square) in each of the bags labeled Mystery Bag A. Use the included “bag tags” to label half of the bags as Mystery Bag A and half of the bags as Mystery Bag B. I’ve used tissue paper before and it worked just as well. The filler is just to keep kids from easily being able to look in the bag and see the shape. I used the shredded crinkly paper that you typically find in an Easter basket as my filler!īegin filling each bag with whatever you got as your filler. To set up the Mystery Shapes activity (which you can download for free below), you will need brown paper bags, some sort of stuffing or filler to put into the bags, and pattern blocks. This was an essential skill as students prepared to create hierarchies of shapes later on. I created Mystery Shapes as a way to kick off our geometry unit by reviewing some of the work students did in 4th grade with identifying shapes by their properties. When they can no longer see the shape and can only feel the shape, they really have to focus on describing a shape based on their attributes, which is the goal of the Mystery Shapes activity! They likely were not taught what specific properties make a shape a rectangle or square. Most students would not look at a square and call it a rectangle because they’ve been taught since they were very young that a square looks one way and a rectangle looks another way. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but it worked! What better way to get students to focus on the attributes of polygons than taking away their ability to actually see the shapes. A lot of times students don’t actually consider the individual attributes of a shape which makes classifying polygons nearly impossible! I wanted students to be able to focus on the attributes of 2D shapes without depending on the “it looks like this, so it must be this shape” mindset. The type of reasoning that is required to be able to classify objects and make accurate generalizations about each group is a thinking skill that will serve students well down the road. While these standards may not be considered core work for 5th grade math, I think of these as the ultimate critical thinking standards for students. This just means that students are using a visual representation to thoughtfully organize the ideas and groupings students discussed in the previous standard. Standard CCSS 5.G.4 takes this a step further and asks students to create a hierarchy of two-dimensional figures based on their properties. In 5th grade, students are expected to group figures based on their properties and begin making generalizations or statements about all figures in these groups. It can be the number of sides, the length of the sides, the size of the angles, or whether or not the sides are parallel. Common Core standards 5.G.3 and 5.G.4 (or whatever the equivalent of these are for your state) are a continuation of work students did in 4th grade when they started talking about the attributes of shapes.Īttributes or properties of shapes are the things that make shapes different from one another.
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