Applied Science - Science and Math (KA)
Post Lab 

   
OBJECTIVES:
  • Exploring shapes in nature.
  • Describing shapes around us.
VOCABULARY:
  • circle
  • shape
  • square
MATERIALS:
  • worksheet
  • different geometric shapes

Students use a worksheet to describe their favorite shape.

BACKGROUND:

A child’s world before school is usually three-dimensional.  Most things they see and touch has height, depth, width, and weight.  When they arrive at school, a curious thing happens.  Students are asked to draw or write on a flat, 2 dimensional piece of paper.  It is difficult for students to draw depth of objects, so they usually draw a circle for a sphere, a square for a box, or a triangle for a cone.  

Descriptions in science rely on three dimensions.  Objects are spheres, not circles.  It is important for teachers to provide vocabulary for the three-dimensional world.  Students can then describe accurately what they are seeing.

PROCEDURE:

  1. Review two dimensional and three dimensional shapes by using the worksheet.  Have the students color each of the shapes. Discuss the differences between two and three dimensional objects. 
      
  2. With the worksheet as a guide, identify different shapes in the classroom.  Then go outside and continue to identify shapes.  Students may notice that there are more geometric shapes when objects are human-made.  Nature tends to be more obscure in their geometry.
      
  3. Inside the classroom, circles can be represented by wheels on toys.  Spheres can be represented by balls or globes.  Notice that many objects are not perfectly geometric.  A desk is a rhombohedral shape (a 3 dimensional rectangular).
      
  4. Outside the classroom, finding objects is more difficult.  A blade of grass is rectangular, but it has depth to it!  If you look at the top of a slab of cement, it appears two-dimensional yet it also has depth to it.  Trees can be columns or pillars.  Wheels on cars are circular.  Many objects are not strictly geometric structures, but a series of curves.  Describing curved objects is difficult and actually is the mathematical basis of many fields of calculus.
      
  5. Encourage students to draw their favorite shape on the worksheet.

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