In this activity, students explore and describe 2-D faces of 3-D solids using concrete materials. As you cut apart a cereal box to isolate the faces, students identify the shape of each face and glue it to the matching face on an identical box.
In pairs, students use 3-D solids (cubes, prisms, cones, and cylinders) to build a tower and describe it to their partners, who use the description to try to replicate the tower. Finally, students go on a gallery walk to look at some of the towers and listen to their classmates' descriptions of them.
This activity focuses on decomposing numbers to 20 into equal groups, with and without leftovers (e.g., 8 is two groups of 3 with 2 left over). In pairs, students start with a train of 18 or 20 linking cubes, then break off 2 cubes at a time to make towers, then count the cubes. Students repeat the activity, making towers of 3, 4, 5, and 10 cubes.
To consolidate, students discuss conservation of number: no matter how the cubes are grouped, the number of cubes does not change. Students also talk about how as the height of the towers increases, they are able to make fewer towers.
This activity focuses on partitioning a whole into equal parts. To start, students are shown a large paper square folded into 2 equal parts, and are introduced to the concept of one-half of a whole. They are also shown a square folded into 2 unequal parts for comparison.
In pairs, students choose an item (paper strip, paper rectangle, string, ribbon, ball of clay), share it equally among different numbers of people, and name each part. To consolidate, students discuss their sharing strategies and how they ensured the parts were fair.
In this lesson, students learn to divide different shapes and objects into equal parts to share, use math language like halves and fourths to describe equal parts, and understand that more equal shares creates smaller shares.
The class is going on an imaginary visit to the zoo. During the visit, the class is going to feed some of the animals. The class has a limited budget so they can only buy a limited amount of snacks. They can only feed 2 giraffes, 4 lions, 2 chimpanzees, 4 zebras and 2 elephants. Students work in pairs or small groups to decide how to share food fairly among each type of animal making sure to respect the snack preferences of the animals.
The students use their imagination to pretend that they are going to the zoo for a day to work with the zookeepers as assistants. One of their jobs is to divide a specific amount of food equally among the 2 polar bears. They also have to divide the same amounts among 4 grizzly bears and among 10 black bears.
Other Mathology Little Books and Activity Cards that support this unit include:
"What Was Here?"
"How Many is Too Many?"
Activity 15: Geometric Relationships: Consolidation
Activity 16: Symmetry: Finding Lines of Symmetry
Activity 18: Symmetry: Consolidation
Activity 23: Composing and Decomposing: Consolidation