The Wheels on the Bus...

...go round and round!

The most successful and complete project I have done thus far (it is only the second week!) has been with Kindergarten. To be honest, I stole this lesson "series" on shapes from my supervising teacher during student teaching. Many of my lessons are from her, but one really can not blame me when she has 30+ years of experience under her belt! Of course I'm going to steal her lessons, she knows they work!

Kindergartners learn about rectangles through this lesson. I start out by holding up a sheet of construction paper and asking students what shape it is. Some will shout out the answer, some shout out the wrong answer "square!". I ask students what the difference between a square and a rectangle is i.e. two long sides, two short sides. Then I ask students to raise their hands and tell me other rectangles they see in the room. "The door!" "Class, is that a rectangle?" "YES!"

Before the kinders came to class, I precut 2 different colored 3x5 inch rectangles. One is yellow, one is a different color. I prefer red (firetruck), but as my supplies are low at the beginning of this year, and I have not had a chance to order any more, I used green.

I hold up the yellow rectangle and ask students what they could make it into. "What is yellow and a rectangle?" I call on students until someone says bus. It can take some hinting to get them to think of it: "It goes up and down the roads. Some of you might ride them to school."

I go through gluing step-by-step with the students, instructing them to use small dots of glue. I even draw it on the board so they can see exactly where to put the glue in addition to demonstrating with a "bus" of my own!

After students glue the bus down on 12x18 paper (I used brown), they are instructed to make it look like a bus and to color a background using crayons. It takes a lot of prompting i.e. "how about a road? or some trees? What is the weather like?"

This is my example (don't judge it, I worked very quickly on this!). I did not show it to the students until after they were already working because I did not want a replica of my own work. The students had snow, rain, flowers, etc. One student even had a birdhouse!

My class is 50 minutes, which is a long time for kinders. After they have worked on this picture, I give them a second rectangle. This they are instructed to make into whatever they want. This requires that they think about what else can be shaped like a rectangle.

I did not do anything with my green rectangle because I want for my students to come up with their own ideas. Some of the green rectangles were made into vans, dump trucks, limosines, and even a few school buildings! My kinders are so clever!

Today, I am teaching this lesson again to the second Kindergarten class. Since I travel between two elementary schools, I will teach this lesson a total of four times. Hopefully during one of those lessons I will remember to take pictures of the students' art!

Next week, we will tackle squares...and scissors!