3D Shapes

One of my brothers is currently in graduate school, studying math at Penn State.  This weekend, I was home in PA with my family, and he was filling us in on his first few weeks of teaching a vector calculous class.  He told me how, during the first class, he challenged his students to draw a shape in 3D to point out that there are multiple ways to see a shape.  Wow, I just taught the same lesson to my kiddos!  Obviously, we had different intentions but still, it's pretty cool.

We just finished our Geometry unit in first grade.  I rearranged the units slightly so that we could do 2D and 3D shapes at the same time.  As I posted about a few weeks ago, this unit had a lots of "ah-ha!" discovery moments as the kiddos learned to see and understand shapes in new ways.  We started out introducing 3D shapes by having the kiddos examine the "footprints" of different blocks.  They were shocked to discover that a pyramid actually has one face that is a square.  Even more surprising was that a ramp block, has one face that is a rectangle.

After the kiddos had a fairly solid grasp on this idea, I asked them to attempt to draw a block in 3D.  This had some fascinating results.  Some kiddos drew the base, sides, and top all stacked on top of each other; others drew the faces of the shape in a row; others drew slanted lines to show perspective.  This lesson was also very frustrating for many of my little guys, because while they know what they want to draw, they can't figure out how to make it on the paper.  We talked about some traditional ways to draw 3D shapes and also tried to explain that there is no "one right way."

The next step of the lesson was to attempt to draw a building of 3D blocks.  This was also an interesting and often frustrating task for the kiddos.  They struggled to figure out how to show depth, angles, and height.  After they had something on paper, I had them switch with a peer and try to create the building they saw on paper.  This really showed them the importance of accuracy and perspective. As a class, we discussed the challenges of this activity and why it was valuable to learn from both our success and mistakes in drawing 3D shapes.

Next week, we are back to focusing on addition and introducing subtraction.  Let's see how that goes!