For Small Group, we took beautiful "ocean jewels" and placed them on the lines of shape cards. It was amazing to see how much the children enjoyed lining up the jewels. Above, Friend "K" chose "the one with six sides" and was so proud of her work when she closed up the shape. After doing the lines, she then continued to add jewels to the inside of the shape until the entire surface area was covered.
Because I had heard both children name the common shapes (triangle, rectangle, and square) in their block play, I specifically chose flash cards that had more unusual shapes for the children to select from. Although the common shapes were also offered, they chose to work with the new shapes: parallelogram, pentagon, hexagon, trapezoid, and rhombus.
They will likely need to see, hear, and say these shapes many more times before committing them to memory, but it did provoke interesting discussion at the table. We talked about counting the sides of the shapes. Friend "K" looked at the space enclosed by the lines, which is what a shape is. We described the shapes, like a "parallelogram looks like the rectangle got pushed over," and the "trapezoid looks like the rectangle got squished at the top." We also observed the size of the shapes and number of sides in correlation to how many jewels they would need to cover all the lines. Larger shapes like the hexagon required more jewels than the small rhombus. It was fascinating to see the children really engage with these manipulatives and talk about geometry in depth at the ages of 3 and 4!
