Often in professional development settings it is productive to anchor the content of the day around one activity designed for children.  Within the context of the activity, we can engage participants as learners themselves, explore ideas of children's mathematical thinking within specific content areas, and discuss how the activity can be used in classrooms.  This one-day session for practicing teachers explores spatial relations through the activity Describe, Draw, Describe. 

Children often describe characteristics of shapes using their informal out-of-school language. We want to encourage participants to elicit children's informal knowledge and language around the shapes and move them to being as specific as possible.

A short session around spatial relations can support moving beyond thinking about spatial relations as identifying the shapes, expanding their conceptualization of spatial relations and helping them see opportunities to support learning. 

More video resources related to the development of spatial relations, including map making and reasoning about shapes

These guidelines can provide six or more hours on early mathematics (focus on shapes and spatial relations) in a three-unit semester preschool curriculum course. It can be broken into shorter segments. 

This activity provides participants with an opportunity to explore their comfort level and fears around teaching geometry and spatial relations.  

This activity provides participants with an opportunity to explore the attributes of 2-D geometric figures (similar to how one would engage children), and to explore their own beliefs and attitudes about supporting children’s development in geometry and spatial relations. 

The story of a preschool teacher leveraging children's ideas to engage in geometry. It addresses anxiety teachers experience when working beyond simple shapes, offering a perspective that engages participants and the children they teach.