Thursday, April 9, 2015

2-D Shape Books and an App

If you have been hanging out around my blog for a bit, you know that we love to use technology in my classroom!  My kiddos thrive on technology, and many times, are much better than me with it.

Our curriculum began introducing 2-D shapes at the beginning of March and introduced one shape per day. My students were good with shapes, but just needed some vocabulary built (corner/vertex, sides, curved line, etc).  I knew that they would pick this up much easier if they didn't just listen to me say it over and over again.

I broke students into 5 groups and assigned each group a shape: circle, square, triangle, rectangle and hexagon.  Each group was responsible for one shape.  Their job was to take their iPad through the room and take pictures of items that were of their shape.  They were then going to write their first iBook without me sitting right there (big step for this girl who sometimes has trouble letting go of control).

Taking pictures of their shapes.

Hexagons were hard to find, so these smarties created their own!

I was absolutely amazed with the results.  Over a period of four 20-30 minute sessions, each group had created a book.  Students were in charge of choosing their own book title and creating the book. They uploaded their own photos, added text and even drew some arrows in some of them.  We use the app Book Creator to make books because it is so kid-friendly.

We'd love for your to download them using your Apple device or just check out the PDFs.  They get so excited when we have new downloads; thanks for checking them out!


1.  Circles-
iTunes link:

PDF link:

2.  Our Hexagon-
iTunes link:

PDF link:

3.  Things About Rectangles-
iTunes link:

PDF link:

4.  Triangles-
iTunes link:

PDF link:

5.  Square Land-
iTunes link:

PDF link:


At centers, they are more than happy to play with Timmy Learns: Shapes and Colors app that Mary Amoson from Sharing Kindergarten helped design.  At first I thought it was going to be too easy since we weren't using it until March.  Turns out that they didn't mind because they were so engaged in the "play" aspect of it.  They quickly advanced to the skills they were more in need of and are still asking to use it.  Well worth $1.99!

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