Shapes Steam

[Paulette Dzurilla]

Creativityand innovation are increasingly important skills for our society, and a STEAM approach can help our youngest learners develop these skills. STEAM takes a unified approach to normally separated science, technology, engineering, art, and math subjects by working to blend, or blur, the lines between disciplines and require knowledge and thinking across them.

Combining math and art through work with shapes is a great way to develop the foundations necessary for a broader STEAM approach. Young learners should be able to both identify and describe shapes, while also being able to analyze, compare, create and compose shapes. The following four ideas explore projects that combine stories, shapes, and art to create digital STEAM learning experiences perfect for primary learners.

As primary learners develop, they have many ideas about shapes. While shapes may seem simple, deciphering between the literal and conceptual aspects of them can be challenging for some students. After all, different triangles can all have the same name but can look very different from one another. Even a square can be different sizes and colors.

Start by looking around your classroom, or remote learning space, and identifying the shapes that you see. If students are learning from home, show them shapes in your learning space and then ask them to find shapes in their own. As your students identify shapes, ask them what they see when they find a specific shape, and how they know. This will help as you guide your students in appropriate learning activities.

Have students go on a shape hunt around their home, the school, or neighborhood. Encourage students to take pictures or draw images of the shapes they find, such as the rectangle of a door, the square windows, or the triangle in the play structure. Have students document their findings in a shape book.

After locating and identifying shapes, students start grasping the concept that some shapes are made up of, or composed of, other shapes. You might have students construct a house out of blocks or Legos to further illustrate this point. If your students are learning remotely, see if you can find an online game that asks students to create composite shapes.

To evaluate student thinking you can show students a composite shape you have created and ask them to find all of the circles, squares, and so on in it. If you want a more creative performance assessment, challenge students to paint shapes or move clip art shapes around to compose their own monster. You can also ask them to identify the shapes and explain their composition.

To give the project a writing component, challenge students to create how-to instructions for drawing a monster. Have students look at the monster they have designed and use words like large red square body to describe it. Have students sequence their descriptions into steps someone could follow to create the monster.

Share the finished directions with another student to see how they use them to create the "same" monster. This is another great opportunity to help students comprehend that shape words like rectangle can mean different things and still meet the definition of the shape word.

Once students can identify and find shapes, they should be ready to apply shapes for a purpose. Math manipulatives, like tangrams, are a great way to get students to play with math concepts and build number sense and spatial reasoning. Tangrams help students build powerful math skills and understanding of angles, congruence, spatial visualization, and transformation geometry like slide, turn, and flip.

Have students build tangrams such as an airplane, house, cat, or even a dancing person. If you don't have wooden tangrams in your classroom or students are working from home, you can create them from card stock. You can also find virtual tangram activities online and in tools like Wixie. Be sure to work through tangram shape challenges on your own before giving them to students, as some are significantly more difficult than others.

Designing mathematical experiences that appeal to a student's playful, creative, and imaginative side is a win-win. Not only do students develop strong mathematical foundations, they also come to view math learning as fun.

I bought 2 bags of marshmallows when I stocked up on groceries a few weeks ago, and we burned through both of them in one day! First, we made practiced STEM concepts while making Rice Krispies Treats (this was one of my most popular posts from a few years ago). Our second STEAM Activity for the day was building geometric shapes and structures.

I was so impressed with what my kids came up with and created on their own. I was also impressed with how many marshmallows they were able to eat in a short time period! We took a long walk after this activity to burn the excess energy!

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The crossroads of real life and education meet again where we could take this fun topic of ice cream, combine it with friendship, and even add the dimension of learning 3D shapes and it becomes the perfect learning activity!

We came up with and explored 4 other options as a part of this STEAM project. But there are even more that you can discover depending on the age of your child (such as talking about a soccer ball having a mix of pentagons and hexagons). The easiest other than the crumpled ball was gluing the strips around in a circle, which my

But there are even more that you can discover depending on the age of your child (such as talking about a soccer ball having a mix of pentagons and hexagons). The easiest other than the crumpled ball was gluing the strips around in a circle, which my 3-year-old could easily accomplish on her own.

Includes encouragement for the parent teacher, 6 printable resource pages (including reading and listening comprehension skills) in PDF form, and 3 helpful classes to both help and encourage you on your homeschooling journey.

Kara is an author and advocate for positive, grace-filled parenting. She is homeschooler to her 5 children living on a farm in New England. She believes in creative educational approaches to help kids dive deeper into a rich learning experience and has her degree in Secondary Education & Adolescent Childhood Development. She is passionate about connecting with and helping other parents on their journey to raise awesome kids!

Look at those little fingers and hands going to work! With just one geoboard and a bagful of rubber bands, children can create and learn about shapes while developing their hand muscles, fine-motor skills, spatial skills and math skills. This is why geoboards have been a part of our classroom curriculum for more than 30 years.

When I introduce geoboards to new students, I leave the lesson plans and benchmark checklists for later and let the children simply play with their boards. I want them to engage in geoboard play at their own level of development.

Young children develop ideas and concepts about science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics (STEAM) naturally. They think about size, shape, quantity, order and speed throughout the day as they play and explore. As teachers of young children, we need to tap into their natural curiosity with intentional STEAM learning opportunities such as geoboard play.

Intentionality is acting with knowledge and purpose. It is the opposite of chance because it is planned and thoughtful. In order to become intentional about math teaching, we need to think about math the way we think about literacy.

My class used Geo Boards last week. We had to experiment with the different size rubber bands to determine what size needed to make long lines vs short lines. If we made a rectangle we had to have two short bands and two long bands. To make a Christmas we started with long line at bottom and shorter lines as we went up.

You are going to need a surface big enough to accommodate your project. You are going to want this surface to be able to absorb the moisture from steaming and to breath as the project dries. It will also need to accommodate you pinning your project down. I personally use my guest bed which has a 4-inch foam topper on it and a comforter to absorb the moisture! You can also use foam blocking mats and towels to achieve the same effect.

Your first step is to insert your blocking wires into your project. When choosing where to weave your blocking wires you want to start in a corner and weave as close to the edge as possible. You want to weave every other stitch or so. If you span too many stitches your edges will come out with a wavy look so you want to take the time to make this as even as possible. In this piece we have handy ch1 spaces. We are going to use that final row of sc, ch 1, sc all the way around to weave in and out. That will give us a firm anchor to the final row of the project so that we can stretch it to a good shape. Start in the corner of one of the small sides.

Start with your steamer on the lowest setting (until you are sure of how much steam you want to be using, I personally use mine on high) and hold it roughly perpendicular to your work 3 to 4 inches above the fabric of your work (remember that if you are using an iron rather than a steamer be careful to never let the iron touch).

Move slowly back and forth across your work in small strokes. I work across small patches, roughly 8 inches square, until I see the work relax and I can feel with my hands that the area is warm and damp. Then I move on the next section.

When the body of your work is complete, move on to your edges. Pay close attention to your edges, gently tugging your blocking wires as you go to pull the edges nice and straight and set your stitches.

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