Eating Our Way Through 2-D Shapes

At I Teach K! this past summer, I had the opportunity to attend two of Mary Amoson's (Sharing Kindergarten) sessions.  She talked a lot about student engagement and how to make learning fun.  I couldn't wait to get to geometry after her session and one specifically on geometry from Catherine Kuhns.

One of Mary's activities was to use Pull & Peel licorice to have students make shapes.  I found some spring-colored individually wrapped Pull & Peel at Walmart.  If you follow me on IG, you probably saw a picture of this activity.

My kiddos seemed to have a pretty good grasp on basic shapes, so we are focusing more on the vocabulary, composing shapes and describing these shapes.  I created a little recording sheet for them that included: a solid line shape to build the Pull & Peel on, a dotted shape to trace with a pencil and a box to list how many sides and how many vertices.   My kiddos' favorite word is "vertices" lately.  It makes me giggle when they use this correctly without prompting.

She was into making sure that everything was very precise.

This kiddo was quite proud of her idea to number the sides as she built the shapes.

My kiddos loved this activity!  They were engaged the whole time and always seem to be willing to work for a little snack in the end.  The circle seemed to be the most difficult one for them to make because the Pull & Peel was not quite long enough to go all the way around.  It did not like to stay curved as they tried to piece it together.  They loved making the strips smaller and piecing together as needed to make all the shapes.

How do you make geometry fun in your classroom?