Exploring Shapes

It never ceases to amaze me how children can take learning into their own hands as well as challenge each other. After playing this game of "Guess My Rule" once as a class, the children began to play the game on their own using their knowledge of shape attributes. The objective behind this game is that one child thinks of a 'rule' which can be as broad or specific as he or she likes. For instance, it could be anything from 'shapes with straight sides' to 'only small shapes with 4 points'. The game targets each child's ability to think carefully about the attributes of the shapes in front of him or her and to think of a rule that will make it hard for his or her friends to guess as well! Here is a video of one round of this game that occurred this morning as the children were trickling into school. Here, Alex has come up with a rule and as his friends discover shapes that are in his rule, they start to guess what all the shapes in the circle have in common. At the end they figure it out and put the rest of the shapes that match Alex's rule into the circle.