Polyhedrons Scramble (Geometry)

For an introduction to polyhedrons I taped one letter of the word to different polyhedrons. Then we dumped them out on the ground and had the girls try to figure out the word. I asked them to tell me what the fancy word for flat shapes was (polygon), so that helped them get the right beginning of the word, since each polyhedron is made up of polygons that are connected.

Verb's Tents (Verb tenses)

 In this activity, we set up Verb's tents. We folded 6 cards over to look like a tent and wrote "past," "present," and "future" on three cards, and did the same on the next three cards.   

Then we added campers. The girls cut out and named/labeled their campers as follows: camper 1: Will, camper 2: had, camper 3: have, camper 4 and 5 joining hands: Will and Have.  Here's how the tent assignments were made.

Will sleeps in the future tents (He will go). The other campers will only sleep in tents that are absolutely perfect. So as we figured out which one they slept in we added "perfect" to the present, past, or future written on the tent. Have (Short for Havenshire) sleeps in the present perfect tent (I have gone). Had (short for Hadley) sleeps in the past perfect tent (He had eaten), and Will and Have both sleep in the future perfect tent (They will have finished by then).

  

The girls cut out another camp leader (Jennifer cut a dolphin, Jessica cut a flower with the sign "ing" attached). Well, this camp is a very progressive camp with a progressive leader (the new camp leaders they cut out) that wakes everyone up by shouting "Wake up! You need a little Zing in your life (saying "ing" instead). This is a progressive camp!" This leader goes up to the perfect tents and wakes them up and makes them use a progressive perfect verb for their tent. She makes them add "ing" onto the end of their verb. For example, for the Future perfect tent, they could say "John will have been going . . ." For the past perfect tent, they could say "He had been staying. . ." For the present perfect tent, they could say "We have been eating..."



Past and Present Participle Verb Popsicles

We created paper popsicles to help us remember past and present participles (popsicles) for verbs. One each popsicle was a flap at the top. For the past participles they wrote the helping verbs under the flap at the top. Then they wrote the correct form of the past tense verb as it would be used with the helping verb (like "smiled" to be used with the helping verb "had"). For the present participle popsicles, there was also a flap to the right of the words where the ending "ing" was written. So for those words, they wrote several present tense verbs and then "ing" under the flap. Then they wrote the appropriate helping verb under the flap at the top (is, are, am, etc.)

  

Finding the area of Circles

In this tasty (and sticky) activity, we began with fruit leather circles bought at the store. Then we lay them out on parchment paper (so they wouldn't stick) and cut them, with scissors, like a pizza into 8 pieces. Then we lay each piece next to each other in opposite directions to create a parallelogram.

Then we measured the base and the height (length and width) of the parallelogram and determined it's area. Then we laid out another circular fruit leather and measured its diameter and determined its radius. Then we learned the formula for finding the area of a circle with this silly illustration of a square pie. After we figured out the area of the uncut circle fruit leather, we compared the area with the area we got when we measured the parallelogram and it was almost the same.

The girls were happy when they got to eat the "fruit" of their labors.