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.
This fictionalized but very real story of actual teacher experiences tells the story of a team-teaching effort to incorporate meaningful and important concepts in geometry and spatial relations into a project-based preschool curriculum.
Additional readings about supporting young children to develop spatial relations understanding. Download the articles directly from this page.
This resource is designed to engage your participants in learning about shape. The basic idea is to help your participants gain some insight into the challenges children face in learning about shape.
Resources that teacher educators can use to support teachers to develop classroom practice that engages young children in spatial relations.
This resource provides an overview of how teacher educators can engage participants in Describe, Draw, Describe (DDD). The components have been developed to provide support for connecting children's ideas about spatial relations and pedagogy.
In the activity, children are asked to view a picture (simple drawing, storybook page, complex geometrical shape, etc.), and describe what they notice in the picture. Then they draw what they see. This activity enables children with varying understandings of spatial relations to learn.
Imagine that you, as a teacher, are preparing to read a book to a child or group of children and you want to use the story as an opportunity to develop understanding of shapes or spatial relations. This document describes what you might do.
This story is written not for children, but for prospective and practicing teachers. It takes the child’s point of view about shapes and presents the adventure in an amusing manner that will draw in adults who may have some anxiety regarding mathematics.
This story is written not for children, but for prospective and practicing teachers. It takes the child’s point of view about counting and presents the adventure in an amusing manner that will draw in adults who may have some anxiety regarding mathematics.