Monday, February 4, 2013

Montessori Monday - Counting Corners with Pushpins


My kids love pushpin activities - they provide great fine motor practice for the pincer grip used in writing.  Today I switched things up a little by including some shapes cut out from construction paper and inviting L and E (3.5 years old) to use the pushpins to count the corners..



Here is what their activity tray looked like.  I didn't give the kids free access to this one because I want to keep a close eye on the pushpins so they don't end up on the floor.  I took it out as a "special activity" and the girls were very excited.


The kids set to work right away and knew exactly what to do.  It was a great opportunity to review that triangles have three corners, rectangles have four corners, hexagons have six, etc...  We also discussed the term "quadrilateral".   I included all sorts of shapes including both polygons that were familiar to them and other more unusual shapes.

 

I intentionally included some concave polygons to get a discussion going.  L didn't think the interior angle of the concave polygon counts as a corner, so we tried to come up with a definition of a 'corner' (the point where two edges meet).  I'm pretty sure L was not convinced, but I'm glad I got her thinking.

 

This was such a fun little Montessori-inspired exercise in Geometry, that we'll definitely be repeating it again soon.

Montessori Monday

Please 'like' Learners in Bloom on Facebook for more fun!

Check out all the wonderful linky parties I participate in on the sideback (right hand side).


1 comment:

  1. My son loves pushpin activities, too! He was so proud I trusted him with them.

    ReplyDelete

I love getting comments! No spam, please.