Geometric Sense Activities for Grades K - 2

These activities will help your child develop geometric sense, an important "strand" or math theme tested in the WASL math activities.

Geometric Sense Activities - Use the following links to see the activity.
Shapes Around the House Patterns with Beads Grocery Store Shapes
Shape Hunt Straw Shapes Symmetry

(Activities taken from Mathematics a Guide for Parents to Everyday Mathematics and Helping Your Child at Home Grades K-6, published by Central Kitsap School District Department of Curriculum and Instruction, 2000.)

Shapes Around the House

  • Ask your child to find objects around the house and/or neighborhood that have particular shapes, such as circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles. For example, look at doors, windows, and clocks. What shapes do you see?
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Patterns with Beads

  • Using different colored beads or paper squares to create patterns, take turns making patterns (such as one yellow, two green, one yellow, two green). Then have the other person tell what comes next in the pattern. As your child becomes comfortable, increase the complexity of the patterns.
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Grocery Store Shapes

  • When shopping at the grocery store, you can ask questions about the shapes being observed. "Which items are solid? Which are flat? Which shapes have flat sides? Which have circles for faces? Rectangles?"
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Shape Hunt

  • Walk around your house or neighborhood with your child. Bring paper and pencil to draw the shapes you see that make up the buildings. You can later sort the shapes.
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Straw Shapes

  • Your child can connect flexible drinking straws to create shapes. This can be done by bending the straw at the "elbow," pinching the long end and inserting it into the short end of another straw. Connect three straws to make a triangle--four straws to make a square.
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Symmetry

  • Collect pictures of product logos, man-made objects, and natural objects from books or magazines. With the pictures, your child can explore lines of symmetry by folding the picture in half to determine whether each half looks the same.
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