13 Hands-on Shape Recognition Activities
Math activities for helping preschoolers, kindergarteners and 1st graders to identify and recognition shapes using activities and FREE printables!
Teaching your child to recognise and understand the unique properties of shapes can be a lot of fun! There are plenty of hands-on activities that can encourage your preschool or kindergarten child to explore and investigate the nature of shapes.
Why it is important to learn about shapes
From the day they were born, your child was programmed to recognise their world is made up of an endless arrangement of shapes. As a young baby they instinctively reacted to the way shapes are arranged to make up the human face, particularly your face! Every day they are processing different shapes and their properties from the circle pizza with triangle slices to the rectangular pillow that rests on their rectangular bed. Learning to name and identify shapes is an essential part of their developmental experience. Not only does it help them make sense of the world around them, it is a core component of enhancing their school success.
Improves math achievement
A growing body of research shows that young children's spatial abilities can predict their overall math achievement. It seems that the important skills are their ability to visualise what shapes will look like when they are combined or rotated. These skills are not innate, so it is important to teach children these spatial skills and it starts with being able to recognise and name the properties of shapes. Activities that encourage your child to put shapes together or rotate them will support forming greater spatial awareness.
2. Essential for developing math skills
Being able to sort, categorize, or describe concepts such as size, shape and space are the foundations of math topics such as geometry. This is where the spatial abilities mentioned above become important as your child develops their toolkit to problem-solving complex math.
3. Supports literacy and numeracy
Letters of the alphabet and numbers are really just a series of lines and shapes. When your child is learning about circles, squares, or rectangles, they are setting the stage for letter and number recognition. A child that can tell the difference between shapes increases their ability to make distinctions between letters and numbers. With this understanding comes a growing ability to translate that knowledge onto the page. Importantly, they gain the ability to recognise those differences quickly and accurately, essential for developing their reading skills and essential if they are to progress to more complex math concepts such as addition and subtraction.
You can learn more in our articles about the importance of number writing or learning letter recognition.
4. Improves ability to sort and classify
Your child will need to develop their ability to differentiate between objects through classification, categorisation and sorting. Being able to identify if something is the same or different helps children make sense of things but it also lays the foundation for developing the critical thinking skills that will be required as they progress through school. They will need to use not just their observational skills but also their ability to discriminate based on the properties of objects. If we relate it back to shapes, your child will need to know that a square is different to a rectangle not just because they can observe the difference but because they can discriminate between the two based on certain properties such as how many equal sides. This will be relevant not just in math but in science and social science.
5. Improves vocabulary
When teaching your child the name of shapes and their properties you are naturally expanding their vocabulary. Importantly, you are also developing the concept of mathematical language. This is particularly relevant because you are linking math terms to something tangible.
And there is a language of shapes which includes straight, curved, zigzag, thin, thick, wide, narrow, circle, triangle, square, rectangle, star, round, flat, point and more.
Types of shapes
Although shapes are found all around us they do take different forms and as your child develops their understanding they will need to learn the difference between two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D). A 2D shape is flat. It has height and width but no depth. A 3D shape is not flat and has height, width and depth. Only introduce 3D shapes when your child has a firm grasp on 2D shapes. And start with the basic 2D shapes of circle, square, triangle, and rectangle before introducing more complex shapes such as a hexagon or diamond.
Hands-on activities for learning shapes
It is important to note that children learn many concepts this way:
Concrete - They first learn the shape of the physical object, so it is important to provide a tangible example to connect to the name. For example, the button on their shirt is a circular shape.
Pictorial - Then they learn to associate a picture of the object with the physical. The button on the page in their story book is a circular shape.
Abstract - They can learn to identify a representation of the shape, such as a drawing of a circle on the page.
Incorporating a multi-sensory approach to learning is one of the best ways to support your child to learn and remember new concepts. This means let them touch, taste, move or manipulate objects.
Use our free printables to help your child learn to recognise and understand the properties of shapes.
1. Shapes in the everyday
Shapes really are all around and it’s quite easy to bring everyday items into the learning arena. Whether it is setting the table or taking a walk to the park, you’ll find plenty of opportunities to point out different shapes and talk about their properties with your child. Look for examples that fit into their own daily experience such as the round dinner plate on the table. Street or traffic signs are always great examples and playgrounds are a wonderful combination of many different shapes.
When your child recognises a shape, ask them to trace it in the air with their finger, or give them something as simple as a ribbon or shoelace to try and form the shape themselves. As they form the shape help them name it and talk about it’s properties. Is it round? Does it have corners? How many sides?
2. Read
Take the time to discuss pictures in books and photographs. Your child will start to see various examples of different shapes and they will begin to understand the relationships between objects in the pictures or photographs.
3. Shape sorting
Provide a tub full of relatively flat shapes (remember, we are starting with 2D shape recognition). You can fill it with wooden or plastic shapes. If you don’t have the shapes to hand you can print our free shape card printables, paste them to cardboard, cut them out and laminate. Ask your child to sort the shapes into different groups depending on certain properties:
does it have corners or is it without corners?
does it have curves or straight edges?
is it 2D or 3D?
4. Playdough
Create different shapes in playdough. You can provide them with cookie cutters or everyday objects such as container lids or toilet rolls or give them plastic knives to experiment making different shapes. Start by giving them a model to copy and when you feel they are ready, encourage them to try to make the shapes on their own. Try our homemade no-cook playdough recipe.
5. Toilet roll geometry
This is a super simple activity that incorporates craft.
Take a toilet roll, cut it into 1/2 inch strips.
Craft them carefully into shapes.
Glue them on to a piece of cardboard or glue each shape onto individual pieces of card.
Develop a color code for the shapes, e.g. all squares will be blue.
Invite your child to color the inside of each shape according to the color code.
For example, find all squares and color the inside of each of them blue.
To extend the activity you may consider;
turning this into a sensory board by filling the shapes with beans or beads.
developing fine motor skills by using their fingers or tweezers to move small pom poms or beans inside or outside of the shapes.
creating a pre-writing exercise by tracing the outside of the shapes.
For more fine motor skill activities ideas read our article - 13 Fine Motor Skill Activities for Young Learners
6. Sand, rice or shaving foam drawing
Place your material of choice on a baking tray and encourage your child to use their finger or a variety of cookie cutters or household items (straws, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks) to create the shapes. To extend the activity and develop fine motor skills they could try to pour colored rice or place beans into the shapes they create.
7. Build with shapes
If you have flat wooden, plastic or cardboard shapes encourage your child to combine them in different ways. Ask them to build objects like a house or let their imagination run free. This is a great exercise in developing spatial awareness. Encourage them to combine and rotate shapes to craft their creation.
8. Cooking
This really brings in the multisensory approach by inviting the sense of taste. Bake cakes or cookies in different shapes using cookie cutters, or create the shapes by hand, and then have fun decorating with icing patterns or different colors.
9. Feel the shape
This activity will use the flat wooden, plastic or cardboard shapes from activity number 3.
Put the shapes into a bag.
Place a blindfold over your child’s eyes.
Have them place their hand them into the bag and ask them to pick out a shape.
Describe the shape (is it round, does it have edges) and see if they can guess the shape.
If they cannot guess, have them return the shape to the bag for another try.
10. Paint with shape stamps
You can purchase the stamps, use cookie cutters, household items (toilet roll for a circle, plastic container lid for a rectangle) or create your own potato or sponge stamps. Provide a variety of paint colors and plenty of paper or cardboard and let them experiment with different shapes on the paper. Ask them to create a picture of an object such as a rocket or flower and encourage them to combine or rotate shapes to produce their picture.
11. Create a collage
Now that your kid has created all these wonderful painted shapes with their stamps, cut them out and let your little one create a collage. This doesn’t have to be a structured activity. Let them explore and investigate ways to position the shapes on the paper and see where their creativity takes them.
12. Games with shapes
Games are a great way to learn about shapes.
Shape postbox - create a postbox out of a tissue box, carboard box or plastic container. Use the flat shapes mentioned above and ask your child to post certain shapes to the box, for example, post a circle, or post a shape with 3 points.
Card games - play shape snap. Print our free shape card printables and laminate to create a pack of cards and play snap.
Memory - you can use the same cards to play a memory game. Print them twice to make sure you have two of each shape.
Play ‘shape and seek’ - pull a card from the pack and have your child try to find an example of that shape in their environment, for example, a clock is a circle shape.
13. Printables
A good way to supplement their learning is to invite them to complete our free basic shapes activity pages. These pages are designed to support your child in recognising the shapes, understanding basic properties and to practice drawing the shapes.
The Final Word
Learning about shapes is one of the fundamental concepts that will set your child up for overall math achievement but it doesn’t have to be a boring task. It can be fun, engaging and full of independent exploration. Give them the tools and encourage them to investigate the world of shapes.