From the apple on your desk and the coffee cup in your hand, to the cabinets along the classroom wall, basic three-dimensional shapes are found everywhere in the world around us. Introduce young mathematicians to the these common figures...

Expose youngsters to 3-D objects in a hands-on learning activity involving marshmallows and toothpicks. Engage your young mathematicians by introducing them to 3-D shapes by means of a story book. Explore 3-D shapes by manipulating...

Learning that size and orientation don't affect the classification of shapes is a big step for young mathematicians. Support children with developing this key understanding by looking at the array of shapes included in this resource. For...

A variety of activities take scholars outside the classroom to explore shapes, symmetry, measurement, patterns, sorting, and time in nature. Learners participate individually, and in teams, to measure found objects, go on a...

Challenge the spatial thinking of your young mathematicians with this printable tangram puzzle. Using different sized triangles, squares, and parallelograms, children must figure out how to fit all the shapes together to create a square.

Learners follow a series of instructions for drawing and coloring different shapes in order to learn the difference between the perimeter and area of a polygon. Then they are asked to find the perimeter and area of a 3x4 rectangular...

Change up the classroom atmosphere with this interdisciplinary resource. Following along with the children's book Mr. Slaptail's Curious Contraption, these math worksheets provide practice with a wide range of topics including...

All shapes have certain defining attributes that set them apart from others. In order to understand this, young mathematicians look at examples and non-examples of triangles, rectangles, and squares, working as a whole class to create...

Add a sense of excitement to your math class with this race across the country. Using their knowledge of all things circular, young mathematicians work in pairs answering a series of pi-related word problems as they hop from one city to...

An exercise in finding the area of polygons by decomposing into triangles and composing into rectangles is the focus of this resource. Make several copies of the worksheet for each participant. Ask learners to use colored pencils to...

This collaborative activity investigates the meaning of a trapezoid and a parallelogram. It begins by presenting two different definitions of a trapezoid. Learners are to reason abstractly the difference between the two definitions and...

Dream big or go home. After analyzing a bar graph on the number of bedrooms in US homes derived from census data, scholars design their own dream homes. They cut out two-dimensional shapes from construction paper to create models of...

Four polygons each have a fraction with unlike denominators printed on them. Creative math minds select several shapes to create a design with and then write and solve a math problem involving the addition of all of the fractions...

It's amazing the complex figures that can be made using only a few simple shapes. Following a class reading of the children's book Grandfather Tang's Story by Ann Tompert, young mathematicians use sets of tangrams to create models...

Try five problems on triangles. Levels A and B focus on shapes that can be created from right triangles. Level C touches upon the relationship between the area of a six-pointed star and the area of each triangle of which it is composed....

Now you'll never have trouble cutting a cake evenly again. Here is a set of five problems all about partitioning shapes into a given number of pieces and identifying the fractional amount of each piece. As learners progress through the...

Here you will find a model of a linear relationship between two quantities, the water depth of a channel and the distance across the channel at water level. The cross section of the channel is the shape of an isosceles trapezoid. The...

Third graders are exposed to finding the area of polygons by decomposing figures and recomposing them into rectangles. This strategy allows children to expand on their prior knowledge of constructing shapes by rearranging parts into...

Investigate polygons from rectangles to triangles to octagons. Each level of the five-problem series targets a different grade level. Beginning with the level A problem, learners examine the relationship between area and perimeter by...

Investigate the volume of irregular figures in an inquiry-based exercise. Presented with an irregularly shaped box filled with water, learners must predict the level of water when it is tipped on its side. The class can divide...

Geometers construct a mobile or ornament using nets of three-dimensional polyhedrons. Not only do they need to compute the volume and surface area of each figure, they also earn points for creativity, neatness, and more!

Students engage their critical thinking skills to solve challenging math problems. In these problem solving lessons, student work with tessellations, weights/measurement, reasoning, surface area, geometric shapes, and algebraic procedures.

Investigate the attributes of polygons. A thorough set of lessons presents problem scenarios for elementary through high school classes. The first lessons focus on basic characteristics of polygons, including the line of symmetry. As the...

If cubism were a religion, would you follow it? Lower-level tasks focus primarily on counting the number cubes in a structure and relating the number to surface area. As learners progress to higher-level tasks, isometric drawings and...