5th Grade- Symbolic Shape Collage!

5th grade also learned about shapes. However their focus was on symbolic shapes. We breifly reviewed geometric and organic shapes and drew them on the board. I showed them a PowerPoint of symbolic shapes that they see in the world around them. Mostly it included logos of products and places that they see all of the time without including the names. They were able to guess the logos by just looking at the basic shapes and colors. I told them that symblic shapes were shapes that represented something. They were shapes that had meaning and people could understand the meaning by looking at them. I then had the students draw five shapes that symbolized themselves on a sheet of practice paper. The shapes had to be simple and without much detail, if any at all. The next class the students drew and cut out each symbollic shape out of scrap paper. Once they had their shapes cut out, they took one shape at a time and flipped them over so the backside was face up and then used a crayon to color around the edges, making a stencil-like design when the shape was lifted back up. They did this 3 times with each shape and then glued the shape down on their papers. They could add their names at the end if they wanted to. They turned out nice and are very personal. You can tell things about each student from looking at their work.