Teaching Shapes & Spatial Skills

Encouraging your preschooler to practice with shapes, sizes, and relative places can help them in more ways than you might think. Building towers with blocks and putting together age-appropriate puzzles are a great way to help your child understand spatial play. This critical skill helps your preschooler gain a sense of their size, space, position, direction, shape, and movement within an environment. While spatial play may seem abstract, it is a critical key for kindergarten learning since it can affect a child’s early math skills and their ability to follow directions.

Spatial skills are important to us throughout our life, from helping us drive a car, cross the street safely, put together furniture, etc. Developing these skills early will help a great deal with early math skills starting in kindergarten. When it comes to kindergarten readiness, teachers will expect a child to know and recognize four simple shapes – triangles, squares, circles, and rectangles – PLUS, your child should understand spatial math words such as on top of, underneath, in front of, and behind. This helps them follow simple directions and gives them an understanding of where their body is in relation to their environment.

If you are looking for ways to teach your preschooler the language of space & shapes, try these fun, easy to use methods:

Try a Shape Treasure Hunt

Treasure hunts are a great way to build math skills and a fun way to practice recognizing shapes. Whether you go on a hike and look for shapes in nature, on street signs, on buildings or cars or you create a simple “treasure map” that will let your child orient and guide themselves to something fun, a shape treasure hunt is a great game to play together.

Practice Math at Story Time

Story time can be used for more than just increasing your child’s vocabulary or love for reading. It’s also a great opportunity to help your preschooler recognize shapes and spatial representations. When reading a picture book, point out shapes and spatial locations such as “The house has a triangle roof,” or “The swing set is beside the pool.” Utilizing mathematical language helps your young child get used to processing and using it.

Practice with Chores

Small, simple chores like stacking small cups or bowls into larger ones can help children understand spatial math concepts. Even laundry day can turn into a learning adventure. Have your preschooler sort towels, hand towels, wash clothes, and bath sheets and stack them from largest (on the bottom) to smallest (on the top). When it comes to your child’s behavior in kindergarten, a solid understanding of prepositions, such as behind, over, up, and down, will help your child understand directions. Chores are a great way to accomplish a solid understanding of these concepts.

At Kids ‘R’ Kids Avalon Park, we encourage our preschoolers to practice math & spatial concepts in a fun and entertaining way. We love seeing our students play to their hearts content with things like puzzles, legos, and building blocks – all of which are great for learning the basics of math in a way that is not scary or confusing. If you’d like to find out more about our amazing preschool programs to help your little one prepare for kindergarten, contact us today.