HOW CAN I TEACH MY CHILD GEOMETRIC SHAPES ?
Teaching preschool children geometric shapes can have many benefits. The most well-known benefits can be listed as enhancing children’s creativity, providing school preparation, supporting analytical thinking, establishing cause-effect relationships and supporting categorization skills. So, how can we give our children a simple geometry education that has so much benefit? What path can we follow and what can we pay attention to in preschool geometry education?
To Teach Preschool Geometric Shapes
Preschool children can learn simple shapes such as circles, triangles, squares and rectangles. However, we educators and parents may need to assist this process by using different materials or analyzing the shapes with the children. So, how can we help our children learn geometric shapes in preschool? As the Vimbo family, we’ve listed a few tactics that can be used.
• Identifying shapes: The first step in teaching our children geometric shapes may be to help them grasp the forms of shapes. For example; It may be correct to talk to the children we introduce with triangles about the edges of the triangles and to make them meet triangles with different characteristics.
• Reinforcement with examples from daily life: We can teach our children, who learn geometric shapes one by one, the areas where these shapes appear in daily life. Asking the TV to describe its shape, asking what geometric shape a ball looks like, and so on can be reinforcing.
• Comparing shapes: At this stage of our adventure of teaching geometric shapes, we can ask children to compare shapes in different forms. For example, we can help them encode the forms more consciously by asking for the differences between triangle and square.
• Making production using geometric shapes: For this stage, all we have to do is bring together different 3-dimensional geometric shapes and play games with our children. For example, constructions can be made with small boxes and toilet paper. Our children, who often surprise us adults with their creativity, diversify these games and can learn while having fun.
• Teaching dimensional differences: Children who grasp 3-dimensional geometric shapes may have much less difficulty grasping 2-dimensional shapes. For this reason, we may need to make sure that our children have a good grasp of 3D shapes and forms before we start working on paper. Then, we can make them grasp the 2-dimensional representations by playing games such as cutting and pasting, grouping similar shapes, or matching 3D blocks with geometric shapes on paper.
• Verbal reinforcement: For children, comparing 3D objects may have become an extremely daily activity. However, our children, who are accustomed to comprehend geometric shapes in 2 dimensions, can enter into a deeper learning process by using words that indicate attributes such as long-short, narrow-wide, thin-thick.
