Using the Shapes Song, students learn all about shapes, including Shape Names and Shape Recognition. The Shapes Song by Have Fun Teaching is a song that teaches the shapes. Shapes have names their made of angles and lines, there are flat shapes and solid shapes we see them all the…
Corners, points and pointy fun
In 1st grade, angles start with corners. Kids count the corners (also called vertices) and sides of shapes to tell them apart: a triangle has 3 sides and 3 corners, a square has 4 of each. They notice that some corners are "square corners" and some are pointy or wide, which is the beginning of angle thinking. They don't measure angles yet; they use corners to describe and sort shapes. The click moment comes when kids realize a circle has no corners at all!
Little hands and big movements make corners easy to understand.
Play a shapes song and pause after each shape. Kids draw it in the air and count its corners out loud. Singing and counting together makes the facts stick.
Why it works: a catchy, repeating tune gives the brain a hook to hang words on, so sung text is remembered better (Wallace, 1994).
Try it withShapes SongSongsOpen it →Give kids straws and play dough balls. They build triangles, squares and rectangles, then count the corners where the dough connects. Building shows that a corner is where two sides meet.
Why it works: the U.S. Department of Education's guide for teaching elementary math recommends moving from hands-on objects to drawings to numbers.
Hand each child an index card. They hunt around the room for corners that match the card's square corner, like a book or a door. Then look for corners that are pointier or wider.
Why it works: children learn more from words and pictures together than from words alone (Mayer, 2009).
Not formally. They learn about corners, also called vertices, and use them to describe and sort shapes. Measuring angles comes in 4th grade.
A vertex is a corner where two sides of a shape meet. A triangle has three vertices.
Have kids trace each side of a shape with a finger and stop at every corner to count. Building shapes with straws also helps.
Circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, trapezoids and hexagons, plus some 3D shapes like cubes and cones.
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