What kinds of shapes will we see on the Brooklyn Bridge? Entry 1 - Entry 2 - Entry 3

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ENTRY 1 In math class today I was listening to my walkman while we were Working.  You get in trouble for that, but I thought Ms. T. wouldn't notice.  I was wrong.  What we were supposed to be doing was talking in our groups about what we're going to do when we walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and what question our group wants to answer. Ms. T. said  "What do the think you'll HEAR on the bridge?  That is, if you take your earphones off?!" She thought she was being funny, but we took her seriously. Luis said, "OK, we make a list of everything we hear when we walk across the bridge.  It's math class, so we also make a list of angles and squares and things that we see."  When I thought about it, it started to make sense.  But nobody except Luis and me wanted to do sounds, so we didn't.  I said, OK since we've been studying geometry, we could ask "What kinds of shapes will we see on the bridge?"  Then we can decided to do it like a scavenger hunt.  First make a list of all the shapes we're learning about in geometry like the different angles, and polygons, 3-dimensional shapes, and all that.  Richard came out with a whole list . Kelly's idea was to make the list into a chart. It could have the names of the shapes, a drawing, and a description of each shape in words.  Then, on the bridge, when we see a shape, we could take a picture of it to paste on our chart later.  First, everybody made up their own chart . Then, we put all our ideas together and I made one main chart for all of us.  Everybody thought of shapes and angles and I wrote them down on the chart.  You can think of lots more things when you're thinking together . Zena thought that we should also count the shapes we see on the bridge.  I had to explain to Shaun the difference between the tally and the total and how you can make a tally by making slash marks on a piece of paper when you're out counting something, and you tally up when you're done and then you get the total.  It was my idea to use one of the columns to write down the type of each shape.  Like what type of triangle isosceles, or scalene, or whatever . We showed our second chart to Ms. T., and she said, "Great start".  That always means, "Do more".  She said, "What about symmetry" . We thought of some of the other things we had just learned in class, like, pyramids and spheres and we put those things down on the chart too. Back to the top | Jaron's next journal entry