What shapes can you create?

Tuesday 19th June 2018    

Learning shapes is an important task of early childhood. Our June intentional teaching objective is for the children to experience maths-based activities through play, including learning to identify and create shapes.  

A geo board is a manipulative tool used to explore basic concepts in geometry such as shapes, angles, measurement, area, and perimeter. Developing early mathematical skills will help children with problem solving, critical thinking, and learning spacial awareness. A simple geo board is not only an awesome STEM (Science, Technology, engineering and Maths) activity but it is also a wonderful tool for encouraging fine motor skills, creating art, exploring shapes, and developing visual skills.  

In addition to improving hand-eye coordination and muscle control, these boards were designed to increase children’s ability to concentrate and to also go from left to right, and from top to bottom. As a sensorial activity, working with geometric shapes is a great pre reading and pre writing activity. Children learn to see shapes and to name them, preparing them to see letters and numbers and to name them and eventually write them.

Our team have applied some DIY today and prepared some boards made from wood chippings and nails. Our invitation to play encouraged the children to create geometric shapes and patterns. “I want to make a heart…I want to make a star.” Declared Teddy as he busily set about stretching the elastic over the nails from left to right and then right to left.  

“I want to make a star..one, two..three..four..five..six.” Charlie said as he numbered the star’s points on the diagram. “I move it this way…up and down.” He continued as he demonstrated how to make a star on the geo board. Charlie stretched the elastic bands over the nails so they sat tight from left to right, creating a line across the board. “My star.” Said Charlie. He was interested in placing ALL of the elastic bands over the board, almost as if he was trying to piece a puzzle together. Lola worked with Hazel and Ava to decide what they were going to make and supported each other’s learning through directions. Lola was successful at creating her two dimensional shape “Here is my triangle…three. One side is long.” Revealed Lola. Hazel and Olivia wanted to make squares and compared their designs. Oscar wanted to stretch the elastic band as far as it could go across the board before it snapped.

The educators encouraged the children to begin by creating lines starting at the top and side of the board until they could make shapes by joining these lines together. They simply noticed that a rubber band stretched between two pegs automatically fits into a straight line. Through making line segments, children observe that some pairs of pegs are farther apart than others. They see that by putting a rubber band around a peg and pulling it in two directions, they create a corner (or angle). The educators used certain terminology and found natural occasions to give children the language that can help them to communicate mathematically. The rich mathematical structure of the geoboard has for the most part enabled the children to discover mathematical properties with little or no direction from us.

While watching the children explore shapes and angles, we noticed that they unintentionally made a square and triangle. It was amazing to see the children’s excitement, all from a few nails and wood off cuts. We spent the most part of the afternoon creating shapes at different angles and within each other. Watching the children work on their geo boards gives us a sense of how they approach a mathematical problem. Their thinking can be “seen,” in so far as that thinking is expressed through their movement of rubber bands. 

This activity was great in assisting the children to find the surface area of shapes. We could extend this activity by adding coloured elastic bands, using ribbon and shoelaces to further challenge fine motor development and dexterity.