Unit 6
Geometry, Time, and Money
Unit Goals
- Students reason with shapes and their attributes, and partition shapes into equal shares, building a foundation for fractions. They relate halves, fourths, and skip-counting by 5 to tell time, and they solve story problems involving the values of coins and dollars.
Unit Narrative
In this unit, students transition from place value and numbers to geometry, time, and money.
In grade 1, students distinguished between defining and nondefining attributes of shapes, including triangles, rectangles, trapezoids, and circles. Here, they continue to look at attributes of a variety of shapes and see that shapes can be identified by the numbers of sides and vertices (corners). Students then study three-dimensional (solid) shapes, and identify the two-dimensional (flat) shapes that make up the faces of these solid shapes.
Next, students look at ways to partition shapes and create equal shares. They extend their knowledge of halves and fourths (or quarters) from grade 1 to now include thirds.
Students compose larger shapes from smaller equal-size shapes and partition shapes into two, three, and four equal pieces.
As they develop the language of fractions, students also recognize that a whole can be described as two halves, three thirds, or four fourths, and that equal-size pieces of the same whole need not have the same shape.
Which circles are not examples of circles partitioned into halves, thirds, or fourths?
Later, students use their understanding of halves and fourths (or quarters) to tell time. In grade 1, they learned to tell time to the half hour. Here, they relate a quarter of a circle to the features of an analog clock. They use “quarter past” and “quarter till” to describe time, and skip-count to tell time in 5-minute intervals. They also learn to associate the notations “a.m.” and “p.m.” with their daily activities.
To continue to build fluency with addition and subtraction within 100, students conclude the unit with a money context. They skip-count, count on from the greatest value, and group like coins, and then add or subtract to find the value of a set of coins. Students also solve one- and two-step story problems involving sets of dollars and different coins, and use the symbols $ and ¢.