Teaching About Shape | DREME TE 2024/5/2 02:10

Teaching About Shape

This resource is designed to engage your participants in learning about shape. The activities are similar to
those your participants can use in teaching children, but are more complex and demanding. The basic idea,
(one often used in teacher workshops) is to help your participants gain some insight into the challenges
children face in learning about shape.

by Colleen Oppenzato (https://dreme.stanford.edu/people/colleen-oppenzato) and Herbert P. Ginsburg

(https://dreme.stanford.edu/people/herbert-ginsburg)

Revised November 8, 2018

Activity for Teacher Educators

Frequently, when young children learn about shapes, teachers emphasize the names of shapes instead of their
properties. Review What Children Know and Need to Learn about Shape and Space (/spatial-relations/what-
children-know-and-need-learn-about-shape-and-space) for details on the challenges children face when learning to
classify shapes.

Shape Touch: An Activity for Your Participants

In this activity, participants will reach into a bag, touch, and describe different shapes, without looking at them.
Other participants will guess the shape. Being unable to see the shapes will help participants focus on the
properties, rather than the names, of shapes.

Materials Needed

To create materials for the activity, print nets on cardstock. Then cut out the nets, fold them into solid Ogures, and
tape them together, as shown in Figure 3. An alternative is to use physical manipulatives, like wooden or foam
solids.

https://prek-math-te.stanford.edu/spatial-relations/teaching-about-shape 第1/4⻚
Teaching About Shape | DREME TE 2024/5/2 02:10

Try for a good mix of solids. For example, Figure 3 shows eight solids. These include:

prisms: cube, rectangular prism, triangular prism

pyramids: triangular pyramid, pentagonal pyramid, rectangular (square) pyramid
other solids: cone, cylinder

Separate participants into small groups of three or

four and gave each group an opaque bag containing
at least six of the solids. We deliberately chose solids
for each bag that would pose challenges. For
example:

A triangular prism and a rectangular pyramid both

have faces that are triangles and rectangles, as
shown in Figure 4.
A cone and a cylinder each have at least one
circular base.
The cone and the pyramids have an apex point
(vertex).
A pentagonal pyramid is not a common solid, so students need to pay attention when determining the shape
of the base and the number of faces.

Activity

Have participants in each group take turns. One participant will be the describer and the others will be
the listeners. The describer's job is to reach into a bag without looking, feel a solid Ogure, and describe its
attributes in words. Given the verbal description, each listener's job is to guess the identity of the solid. The
listeners do not have to name the solid (although doing so is acceptable) but can instead draw it or describe it
using non-math words (e.g., a "box shape" instead of a "rectangular prism"). After the listeners guess the identity
of the solid, the describer will pull it out of the bag to see if the determination is correct.

Walk around and talk with the groups during the activity to answer questions and encourage participants to focus
on individual bases, faces and points, in order to describe the solids in terms of their deOning properties rather
than just their names Try to keep participants focused on the exploration of shapes and what they are learning,

https://prek-math-te.stanford.edu/spatial-relations/teaching-about-shape 第2/4⻚
Teaching About Shape | DREME TE 2024/5/2 02:10

not on how well they can name three-dimensional solids, especially since some, like the pentagonal pyramid, are
not common shapes.

Some of our participants seemed more concerned

about what they did not already know than what they
were actively learning. The TE needs to be alert to this
possibility. For example, in one group, the describer
was holding a triangular prism. The describer wrote, “I
initially told my group that the base was rectangular
and the top was triangular. Everyone knew what
shape it was but we could not think of the formal
name for it.” Nevertheless, the listeners did identify
the correct solid. One listener guessed that it was a
“tent shape” and the other drew a triangular prism
resting on one of its rectangular faces. The Orst
image in Figure 5 shows how they envisioned the
shape.

Despite the correct identiOcation, members of the group were disappointed and did not feel successful. They
were surprised when the course assistant rotated the prism to look like the second image in Figure 5, explaining
that the bases of a triangular prism are triangles, not rectangles. One listener focused on what had been learned,
writing that “we learned that bases of prisms must be parallel.” However, the other listener wrote, “My group
speciOcally called one of the shapes 'tent shape', and even as I write this I still cannot remember the [proper]
name of the shape!” The instructors again emphasized that the participants had successfully described and
guessed the shape, and thus achieved the goal, which is not to learn the names of solids but rather to explore
and learn about their attributes.

To see an example of how this activity played out in a university mathematical development course, see Teaching
about Shape: in Action (/spatial-relations/teaching-about-shape-action).

Re>ections and Group Share

Ask participants to re`ect on their individual experiences in writing. You can have them to write freely or give
them questions, such as, “How was it different to describe a shape without being able to see it? What strategies
did you use to Ogure out the shape?” After participants have had a chance to re`ect, bring the whole group back
together to share.

Conclusion

This activity is intended to give participants a sense of the challenges young children may experience when
classifying shapes. It is modeled after a task used with young children in the Big Math for Little Kids program
(Ginsburg, Greenes, & Balfanz, 2003). The children's activity substitutes two-dimensional shapes, like pattern
https://prek-math-te.stanford.edu/spatial-relations/teaching-about-shape 第3/4⻚
Teaching About Shape | DREME TE 2024/5/2 02:10

(Ginsburg, Greenes, & Balfanz, 2003). The children's activity substitutes two-dimensional shapes, like pattern
blocks, for the solids used in this activity. The activity provides a literal “hands-on” way for children to explore
shapes by using senses other than vision. It gives children the opportunity to discuss the attributes of each
shape with their peers and learn something new about the shapes themselves.

Reference

Ginsburg, H. P., Greenes, C., & Balfanz, R. (2003). The Big Math for Little Kids Early Childhood Mathematics
Program. Parsippany, NJ: Pearson

This website is a project of the Development and Research in Early Math Education (DREME) Network
(https://dreme.stanford.edu/).

Copyright © [2024] Stanford University, DREME Network. All Rights Reserved.

https://prek-math-te.stanford.edu/spatial-relations/teaching-about-shape 第4/4⻚