Students listen to and draw illustrations for the story The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns. A good open-ended assessment for this critical indicator is to ask students to sort a collection of shapes into groups, explaining their reasoning. The teacher should encourage the students to invent appropriate group names and to use informal language to describe the properties, and should record the students' responses to look for progress over time. A more traditional, but still useful, assessment strategy is to ask students to sort pictures cut from magazines according to shape. This more focused task will generate information about the students' ability to recognize and differentiate among shapes.
Students make class books shaped like a triangle, a rectangle, a square, and a circle.
They fill each book with pictures of objects that have the shape of the book. Students turn a geometric shape into a picture. For example, a triangle might become a tower, a clown face, or the roof of a house. Investigate and predict the results of combining, subdividing, and changing shapes. Students use tangram pieces to construct triangles, rectangles, squares, and other shapes.