Shape Art Worksheet

Shapes are everywhere once a child starts looking for them, and a picture is the friendliest place to start looking. This Shape Art Worksheet puts a whole little scene together out of four flat shapes, then asks first graders to find each one and count it. A house, a tree, a sun, a bush and a garden path are built from nothing but circles, rectangles, triangles and hexagons, so the picture teaches the lesson before the child writes a single number.

The page has two parts. In the first part, students study the picture and write how many of each shape they can find in the box below it. The shapes appear at different sizes and in different colors, which is exactly what makes the counting worth doing: a tall rectangle and a wide rectangle are still both rectangles, and the sun and the windows are all circles no matter how big they are. In the second part, students look at four shapes on their own and count the sides of each. That moves them from recognizing a shape to describing it, which is the step first grade geometry is really about. Print it, hand it out, and check it against the answer key on the last page.

What’s Included

• One printable worksheet page with a full shape picture to study
• Four counting boxes, one for each shape in the picture
• Four side-counting items covering the hexagon, rectangle, triangle and square
• A complete answer key on the final page
• Clean, bold shapes drawn to scale with plenty of white space

Three Reasons This Helps Kids

• It teaches shapes in context. Finding a triangle inside a roof is a harder and more useful skill than naming a triangle sitting by itself on a page.
• It builds careful counting. Students have to search the whole picture and keep track of what they have already counted, which is real attention practice as well as math.
• It moves from naming to describing. Counting sides gives children the language to explain why a shape is what it is, instead of guessing by how it looks.

Ideas for Teachers and Parents

Before handing this out, point at one shape in the picture and ask the class to name it together. Some children find this 1st grade shapes worksheet easier if they lightly mark each shape with a pencil as they count it, so nothing gets counted twice. When the page is finished, ask students to look around the room and name three real things shaped like a rectangle. Early finishers can turn the paper over and draw their own shape picture, then trade with a partner and count. Because the answer key is included, the Shape Art Worksheet works well as an independent math center, a morning warm-up, or a quick check before a lesson on shape attributes.

Related Resources

• Counting Shapes Worksheet
• Identifying 2-D Shapes Worksheet
• Sorting Shapes Worksheet
• Shapes Song