Learning about shapes sets the stage for understanding geometry. As your eight-year-old's shape vocabulary grows, so does their math knowledge. At this age, they can often explore more complex 2D shapes like parallelograms and octagons, and new 3D shapes like square pyramids and triangular prisms. Encourage your child to use mathematical language, such as "rhombus" instead of "diamond" or "angles" instead of "corners."
Math Easy Ways to Help Your Eight-Year-Old Learn Shapes and Basic Geometry
Support your child's growing knowledge of shapes:
Make Your Own Three-Dimensional Shapes
Get your child involved with making his own three-dimensional shapes with a variety of materials. Use toothpicks and gumdrops (or mini marshmallows) to create three-dimensionalshapes like cubes, rectangular prisms or triangular pyramids. For three-dimensionalshapes with round edges (like cones and cylinders), paper usually works better. Here are two examples from Bob the Builder: Cereal Box Building and Cheese Cube Construction.
Cyberchase 3D Builder
Buzz and Delete accidentally zapped the houses in Botopolis totally flat. Your child can help rebuild the town by using 2D shapes and spatial reasoning skills to construct 3D structures.
Play This GamePlay with Tangram Puzzles
Tangrams are ancient Chinese puzzle pieces, and they are a great way to explore shape composition and decomposition! Print out your own here, or the next time you eat a sandwich, use it as a learning experience!
Escape from Greasy World
There is trouble in Greasy World and Professor Fizzy needs help. As your child helps to save the day, she will learn to rotate puzzle pieces to fit them together to make a picture, sort objects based on multiple attributes, and order objects by height and length.
Play This GameTeach Squares vs. Rectangles
Using graph paper, have your child draw both a square and a rectangle. Discuss why they are different and why they are the same. Can your child draw a rectangle made out of two squares? Emphasize that a square is a special kind of rectangle that has an equal length on all sides.
Pienado
Your child can practice shapes and spatial reasoning skills by catching and rotating shapes to fill the spaces in this windy game.
Play This GameHidden Two-Dimensional Shape Drawing Challenge
At this age, your child can probably draw two-dimensional shapes fairly well. Challenge them to draw a picture using any combination of the following shapes: square, circle, triangle, rectangle, pentagon or hexagon. See if they can create a scene using all six of these shapes! Then it's your job to find the shapes within the picture.
Shape Quest
Given four sets of clues, your child can use this set of printable shapes to figure out the answer to several Odd Squad shape mysteries.
Do This ActivityHelp Your Child Learn to Love Math with Odd Squad
Odd Squad focuses on a kid-run agency that saves the day whenever something unusual happens. Emphasizing problem solving, teamwork and perseverance in every strange and hilarious new assignment, agents use math to investigate weird problems -- and your child can help!
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