Using Key Concepts at Inquiry Stations

Using key concepts to drive my stations or areas or rotations (whatever you call them) was a great way to let kids explore shapes through different lens.

I don't know why, but I don't do this as nearly enough as I should. Using key concepts makes me think about things differently and allows me to come up with ideas that I normally wouldn't have thought of.

FORM: What shapes can you make from other shapes? What will that look like?

Students discovered that you can make a trapezoid using 3 triangles and you can then combine 2 trapezoids to make a hexagon!

REFLECTION: We had already explored properties of triangles. I used this station and the concept of reflection to get kids to think about what they have learnt.




CHANGE: Student had to change shapes using an original shape or by combining other shapes.




FUNCTION: How can I find a shape that has all these properties?

Integrating Shapes and Multiplication

We have recently started a Shape and Space unit and I wanted to try and integrate multiplication into questions or tasks that I posed to my students. 

I thought about the idea of making a city using different shapes and different multiplication arrays. 

To start the lesson I showed students the city and then asked them to come up with questions that related to multiplication and shapes.  As always they always come up with much better questions than me.

"How many cubes are in each building?" (that was a very common one)

"What shapes are the buildings?"

"If every cube had two rooms, how many rooms would be in each building?"

"What building is the tallest?"

"If two people lived in every cube, how many people would live in the building?"

Starting a maths lesson by getting students to pose the questions is probably the most enjoyable part of the maths we do in class. It allows me to really see who is thinking mathematically. 

They then had to go off and find out how many cubes are in each building. As this was the start of our Shape and Space unit, we just talked about the shapes of the different buildings. 

The lesson after this. I gave students an opportunity to create their own city. I gave them a success criteria to work from. 

This task really gave the students are great chance to visualise and play with different groupings. 

Later this student used the rulers to level the sides of her building. This brought up the role of right angles.

Students communicating mathematically!

Great that kids are learning how multiplication and addition are often required to help solve problems.

It is always interesting to see what operations the kids come up with. More often than not how I what I would come up with. That confirms the importance of being flexible with numbers or in this case groups of numbers. 

Using the Summative Task as the Provocation

I was struggling to come up with a provocation or ideas for our Shape and Space Unit. We are doing a unit the looks at monuments, so I wanted to try and incorporate some kind of building or creating into the unit. 

This unit really made me think how about how I could make it engaging for students. I didn't want to just go through property after property of different shapes. I wanted to give the students ownership of their learning and make them have to use the knowledge they have gained in some way. 

So I thought, what if I give the students the summative task as the provocation for the unit. One that requires them to draw a structure or monument that has to incorporate certain properties?

I have never tried this before, but I thought no harm in trying... I hope!

First, I used the Teaching Student Centered Mathematics text (a wonderful resource), to find out what learning outcomes or big ideas that I need to address at a Grade 2 level. 

I then gave my students time to go through the outcomes and identify what they knew already and what they needed to know. This also turned out to be great formative assessment task that allowed me to find out my students prior knowledge. It also allowed me to challenge those students how needed it. 

Here are some of the student going through the expectations. 

I told students that it is ok not to know any of them... just write I don't know it yet! 

I also gave students time to try and draw it ... most found this challenging.


The kids are now really keen to go and find out what these outcomes mean and then use their acquired knowledge to draw their monument.

I am not sure how this will work out. My one reservation is that, does it give students the scope to inquire? As I mentioned earlier I was really having trouble thinking of how I would get them to do that. Time will tell if this works out.

If you have any ideas then please share.

... I will post again with how it worked out.