FROM THE FIELD
T
he top of my desk is a square, the clock face is a circle, the classroom
door is a rectangle, and my water bottle looks like a cylinder. How can a
child ignore geometry when it permeates the world around them?
Why teach geometry?
MATH
meets
CUBISM
ROBIN A. WARD, PhD. and JENNIFER ALBRITTON, M.Ed.
Geometry is an integral part of a young child’s life, and children acquire
intuitive ideas and notions about space as they move about in their
environment and interact with objects in it. An important aspect of
geometric thinking is spatial visualization, whereby students build and
manipulate objects mentally, including composing and decomposing
objects, and translating between two- and three-dimensional shapes.
During a child’s early schooling, students need to engage in learning
opportunities to develop their spatial visualization skills and to assist
them in classifying and describing properties of shapes and solids.
Cubism enters the room…
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), the Spanish artist, is one of the world’s
most famous painters, perhaps best known for his blue and rose
periods. However, Picasso is equally celebrated as one of the cofounders of Cubism, along with the French artist, Georges Braque
(1882–1963). One of the most influential visual art styles of the early
twentieth century, Cubism is an art movement in which the subject is
broken up into different blocks or pieces and then reconstructed from
various angles and viewpoints. Some of these artists’ most famous
Cubist works include Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921) and Braque’s
Mandora (1909-10). For a class of second graders, the teaching of twoand three-dimensional shapes came to life, when these Cubist artists
entered the room.