KGA

[starksj]

KGA
Identify and describe shapes (squares, circles, triangles, rectangles, hexagons, cubes, cones, cylinders, and spheres)

Question 1: Is this list intended to be exclusive? If a student knows more or less would we consider them below or above meeting the expectations?

Question 2: Should kindergartners teachers take time to teach the difference between hexagons and octagons? We are seeing many kindergartners in our school who are getting mixed up about the two shapes. They’ve been exposed to octagons in real life (stop signs) and have discussed hexagons in class, but when they see one or the other in isolation, and are not able to side-by-side make comparisons, they do not naturally notice the difference. Since octagons are not listed in the standard, I just wondered how we should address this. Of course, I am looking at this from an assessment stand point. How do we assess that the kids have met the expectation of the standard and how do we ensure that teachers are meeting the expectation of the standard in their instruction.

[Bill McCallum]

Aside from anything else you’ve asked, regarding hexagons it may be helpful to emphasize the number of sides/corners as being the defining feature. If students are getting confused between a hexagon and an octagon it may be that they are reasoning purely visually, rather than counting the sides. To check if this is the case try using a variety of hexagons for identification. This page has some examples:

[Bill McCallum]

Sorry, the link didn’t paste correctly: http://www.tutorvista.com/content/math/hexagon/

[Bill McCallum]

I don’t think this standard gets down to this level of detail (distinguishing hexagons from octagons) and I think it is certainly beyond the standards to be assessing Kindergartners on this distinction. The list in parentheses is neither inclusive nor exclusive. Like most other lists in the standards it is there for guidance, and such guidance must always be wedded to common sense. There are many overly focused assessment schemes that are simply trying to read more fine grained resolution from the standards than is there; the standards were not designed to be friendly to such schemes, rather preferring schemes that focus on larger coherent units of mathematical knowledge.

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