Snowflake symmatry and a wonderful Friday

Today I decided to add to what we are doing with shapes. I am a common core classroom and I'm pretty true to what we are supposed to teach. Today I deviated... now I have a reason and it's a good one. We were talking about triangles and I decided to talk about the kinds of triangles that you can draw (equilateral, isosceles etc) and I realized for the kids to really get it they needed to understand line of symmetry. So we huddled up (yep just like in football) and I told them that they were going to learn about something that the big kids are learning! That gets their attention every time! We watched a little piece by the Number Crew from united streaming, which I think explains lines of symmetry better than I can. Then we folded some shapes to see if they had lines of symmetry. We found that most shapes do, but that you can fold a star or a heart so that they don't. Then we talked about how we could make a snowflake that had a line of symmetry. We made one as a class and then I sent them back to tables to make their own.

What we did... first we folded the blue paper so that it had a line of symmetry. See the paper on the right? YOu can see the line. The kids then started placing shapes (pattern block pieces) around a center piece.

Here are some more examples.

I have to say that I LOVE my babies!!  They had so much fun with this activity. I saw the ellison dies in a teacher catalog and really thought that the kids would love to be able to create things with them. I look forward to being able to make more projects with these!!

I just had to add this picture. It was a BEAUTIFUL day today!! Well it did cloud up and tonight it's raining but the weather was mild, you almost did not need a jacket. The little one in the plaid coat is my teacher's assistant. Her job all week has been to lead and help those who aren't doing the right thing using HAND SIGNS only! Here she is pointing to the ground, which tells the line where to be.