Children delight in making choices. The ability to name a favorite color of paper to make a drawing empowers a child. When he can ask for a square or triangle-shaped block by name during a game, he has a sense of control over his environment.

In preschool, children can learn to identify and name circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, and ovals. By using materials such as posters, blocks, books, and games, teachers expose children to various shapes and help them analyze two- and three-dimensional shapes in various sizes and orientations.

For this reason, we are constantly incorporating shapes into our schedule. During circle time, we may sing a song about trapezoids. For gross motor play, we may jump onto triangle-shaped chalk outlines.

For this activity, we broke up into groups to categorize a variety of monster “shapes”. We learned about the word rhombus, diamond, triangle, rectangle, and square.

Encouraging preschoolers to slide, flip, or turn shapes promotes problem solving and an understanding of transformations.

These transformations are crucial to developing spatial visualization abilities and understanding geometry, which involves matching shapes through visualization.

As preschoolers learn to identify objects, they can use spatial orientation vocabulary to describe the relative positions of objects.