Are your children learning about shapes at the moment? There are some helpful ideas to try out in this guest blog post.
Exploring 2D Shapes
By Shelly
We have been doing quite a bit of geometry with my oldest lately so I was thrilled to see all the new shape pages that were added. We especially love all the different useful shape printables. You can print out the stunning colour version for each shape or you could use the black and white version. We stuck with the black and white version but we printed ours onto lots of different coloured paper (that way you save some coloured ink but you still get colourful shapes). These pages are especially good for cutting skill practice.
Cutting out semi-circles
Once the kids have cut out the shapes they can use them for different pictures. My oldest actually played around with some of the shapes (triangles, rectangles and squares) to see what other shapes she could create by combining two or more together.
Or the kids can have some fun gluing the shapes onto a piece of paper to get a colourful modern picture.
Making a modern art picture?
While we were cutting out the shapes and combining them together my son commented that he had a blue, yellow and green circle and it reminded him of his colour wheel. So we decided to make another colour wheel. I printed out more circles in the other colours that we needed and the kids cut some more circles and then we started folding them in half.
Colourful circles
You need to glue the last half of one circle to the first half of the second circle and continue the pattern until the end. But make sure you get the colours in order – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. And then at the end you will join the purple to the red that you start with.
Using the circles to make a colour wheel
We wanted to hang ours up so we used a hole punch to make holes at the very top of the shapes and attached some colourful string. The kids liked the end result so much that we ended up making a few more with patterned paper and different shapes. Just make sure the shape that you choose can divide in half nicely - a good chance to talk about symmetry!
Our colour ball hanging up
Spining decorations!
To go with our geometry theme we also decided to make our own shape poster. I printed out the shape word mat and we cut out the individual shapes.
Then we got a piece of A3 card and divided it into columns. Our column headings were – Name, Number of sides, Vertices (or corners) and for my daughter we added an extra column for "Angles Add Up To". Then the kids stuck down the shapes and started filling in the details.
Making a 2D shape poster
I know you can download professional-looking shape posters but with my two if they are involved in making something they tend to remember it more. Plus they love being able to hang up their own poster in the house and are always proud when they can refer back to a poster that they have made.
And if your kids are trying to remember how to spell all the crazy shape names we recommend the 2D shape vocab cards and the 2D shape word scramble page.
2D shape word scramble and vocab cards
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 6 and 9. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on Maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
