Tangram has always been a favourite kindergarten Maths activity in the Maths learning centre. “Don’t throw the pieces everywhere!” and “Follow the picture and do it yourself.” Are those comments familiar? Yes, most of the time, teachers take for granted that children will figure out the tangram puzzle naturally and do not practice strategically with them at all. If the children are being challenged to create a square with the different pieces of shapes given such as what we had done in class, it will be fantastic!
 |
| Children playing with tangrams |
We will need to have spatial sense in order to play the next activity in class which is to find the interior angles of a pentagon. According to Van De Walle, J. (2009), spatial sense includes the ability to mentally visualize objects and spatial relationships – to turn things around in your mind.
 |
| To calculate the angles within this pentagon |
I find the above activity very challenging but fun as we need to have strong spatial sense to be able to calculate the angles of the pentagon immediately. Some will have a rectangle and two triangles to form the pentagon, where some is four triangles to form and commonly is three triangles to form the pentagon. This is a fun activity to teach or expose children to geometry, angles.
Some links to share:
· Geometry games and videos on types of shapes
· Shapes games for preschoolers
· Interesting Tangrams Video
No comments:
Post a Comment