G) Geometry

It is essential for us to have good spatial sense, in order to be able to understand Geometry. Sadly, it is something that I lack in. As a result, I do not have confidence while attempting Geometry tasks.
                                                      

“What is the sum of the interior angles in a pentagon?” Dr Yeap posed.

“Oh my! What is it? How am I to recall and know?” I asked myself, with tons of question marks above my head, literally.

With the drawing of the pentagon I created, I began to turn the paper around, drew different shapes within the pentagon, just to find out what could be the correct answer. After ‘killing’ lots of brain cells, I simply cannot ‘break the code’! It is definitely quite a frustrating experience.

During the discussion of finding the solution, memories of the properties of various shapes (pentagon, parallegram, rhombus, isosceles triangle, etc.) began to slowly but surely came flowing back to me. I cannot say that I remember all of them but as the discussion went on, I began to see ‘light’.

Each of us is unique and therefore, has our individual way of looking and perceiving things, analysing and solving sums. Through the exercise, this became more obvious as we shared our thoughts on getting the answer; result is that the total angle in a pentagon is 540 degrees.

As the discussion proceeds, we had the privilege to listen and understand how each of us feels towards different subject or topic. Another added advantage for me, was it provided me with a better insight of other possible ways to solve a sum, how I can help children to not only solve Mathematical sums but to apply to situations in their daily life.

Chapter 20 mentioned the content goals for geometry included shapes and properties, transformation, location as well as visualization. Understanding geometry means having a good knowledge of these aspects, being able to understand their relations to geometry.

How, then, do we provide children with these understanding?

According to Van Hiele, there are five levels of understanding spatial ideas. As an early childhood educator, it is therefore important to be able to identify which of these five levels of spatial ideas, a child is in. Only with this understanding will we be able to better plan activities according to the child’s level of understanding.

Van De Walle mentioned, “consistent introduction of experiences with shapes and spatial relationships will help children to develop spatial sense” (2010, p. 400). What better ways than to introduce and provide children with different and various kinds of shapes in their daily life, especially through play!

Below are pictures of some activities that we can provide our children with, so as to promote their spatial sense.

1) Puzzle is a good activity to kick-start children’s spatial sense. During the process, a child will have to flip, turn and rotate the puzzle. He/She will also need to identify the curves of the shapes, the sizes of the puzzle piece, in order to get the correct piece.

 

 

2) Identifying how various shapes (smaller in size) will be able to fix into a bigger shape. For example, how many triangles are needed to fill up this big square or irregular shape

3) Take children out for a walk and see how many shapes they can find. Post them questions like what shapes is the table make out of? or What are the shapes that made out this toy car that you found?