My wife and I are homeschooling my son, and so I work with him on his mathematics. For the first part of the year, our experiences have been fairly informal, but I feel like he and I will benefit from more structure, and so I’m planning on writing lessons and keeping track of the resources we have used, as well as reflecting on those lessons to help me plan what’s next. My son’s number sense and understanding of number operations is fairly strong. Our work here will continue informally, but for at least the next month, I’m going to focus on geometry with him.

The Common Core cluster standard in grade 2 geometry is:

2.G.A. Reason with shapes and their attributes

And the specific standards in this cluster are:

2.G.A.1. Recognize and draw shapes having specified attributes, such as a given number of angles or a given number of equal faces (Sizes are compared directly or visually, not compared by measuring.). Identify triangles, quadrilaterals, pentagons, hexagons, and cubes.

Example task from Illustrative Mathematics:
http://www.illustrativemathematics.org/illustrations/1506
Example MARS task: Don’s Shapes

2.G.A.2. Partition a rectangle into rows and columns of same-size squares and count to find the total number of them.

Example task from Illustrative Mathematics:
http://www.illustrativemathematics.org/illustrations/827
Example MARS task: Half and Half

2.G.A.3. Partition circles and rectangles into two, three, or four equal shares, describe the shares using the words halves, thirds, half of, a third of, etc., and describe the whole as two halves, three thirds, four fourths. Recognize that equal shares of identical wholes need not have the same shape.

Example task from Illustrative Mathematics:
http://www.illustrativemathematics.org/illustrations/826
Example MARS task: Half and Half

My guess is that my son would find all of these tasks fairly easy to do, but I plan on spending our first few days together doing these tasks, and seeing if I can surface my son’s understandings and misunderstandings related to these standards. In terms of a more open-ended project, I suspect that the creation of mathematical art with polygons may be appropriate. For example, my son and I recently created as many hexagons as we could using his pattern blocks (We made one mistake. Can you find it?).