3-D Shapes

This is an example of our journal page for 3-D shapes. By 4th grade, most kids are pretty aware of the attributes of 3-dimensional shapes. I do usually have couple of misconceptions to clear up. The first is that this is a rectangular prism. This is actually a square prism. Prisms all have rectangular faces around the middle. It's those two side faces that tell us it's name.

Rectangular prisms actually look like this:

The second misconception is that bases are the faces on the bottom of the shape. Actually, bases only exist when the shape has a curve. The only shapes we discuss with bases are cylinders and cones.