Shape Identifier
Sub Trajectory: classifying

2D Shapes

When operating at the Shape Identifier developmental level, the child:

Names most common shapes, including, for example, rhombuses, hexagons, octagons, and trapezoids, without making mistakes, such as calling ovals “circles.” Recognizes (at least) right angles, so distinguishes between a rectangle and a parallelogram without right angles.

Activities

You may see this:

Other Examples:

When shown a group of shapes, a child names common shapes such as squares and rectangles, as well as less common shapes such as trapezoids.
A child notices that a shape cannot be a rectangle because “it’s corners aren’t right.”

Help your student become a(n) Shape Identifier

Explorations and discussions involve more than the shapes typically named in our culture, such as many different shapes of hexagons (any polygon with 6 sides), rhombuses (four equal sides; includes squares), and trapezoids (1 pair of parallel sides), pentagons with 5 sides, octagons with 8, quadrilaterals or all 4-sided shapes, parallelograms (two pairs of parallel sides (includes rectangles, rhombuses, and squares) and so forth.

Practice-based Research: What if a child presents a square when asked to find a rhombus? That is good! A square is a special kind of rhombus; it is a rhombus because it has four equal sides, and it is special because it has all right angles. Similarly, a square is a special type of rectangle whose sides are of equal length.