Teaching Geometry in Kindergarten
Discover engaging, play-based strategies for teaching geometry in kindergarten. Align lessons with the Australian Curriculum using hands-on activities that build foundational math skills.
How do you teach kindergarten geometry in a fun and engaging way?
Why do we even need to teach geometry in preschool and kindergarten?
This blog post will explain why it is so important to teach kindergarten and preschool children geometry and it will also explain the Australian Curriculum Geometry strand so you can be confident teaching this complex maths subject.
Preschool and kindergarten children learning geometry will need to learn a lot of new vocabulary related to 2D and 3D shapes along with movement language. Geometry for children can be a little overwhelming but some play-based geometry learning invitations will certainly help. Follow the suggestions in this blog post and your students can be confidently discussing shapes, location, and transformation in no time.
Why is it Important to Learn Geometry in Kindergarten?
Learning all about geometry in kindergarten helps young children to identify and organise information visually.
Geometry also helps them to learn skills that can be transferred to other curriculum areas. Understanding shapes, for example, is a pre-requisite skill for learning to recognise letters and numbers.
Geometry skills and concepts play an important role in the Australian Maths Curriculum.
In kindergarten and preschool, your students will be forming the basic understandings needed to tackle this strand for the rest of their schooling years.
Learning geometry in the early years will ensure the necessary mathematical foundational skills are mastered. It’s important to create a strong foundation of geometry when children are in kindergarten because these foundational skills will be built upon each year with more difficult concepts being introduced at each grade level.
Geometry helps to build important higher-order thinking skills too. Children will develop their logical thinking, deductive and analytical reasoning skills, along with problem-solving skills.
The more hands-on learning opportunities you provide at this stage will ensure your students have the chance to explore and practice the necessary geometry skills needed to master the basics now and will also set them up for success in the next stage and grade too.
Australian Curriculum Geometry Skills
In the Australian curriculum, students are expected to develop an increasingly sophisticated understandings of size, shape, and relative position. They explore the movement of two-dimensional figures in the plane and three-dimensional objects in space. They also investigate properties and apply their understanding of them to define, compare and construct various figures and objects.
Geometry is an essential part of the Australian math curriculum.
The Australian Mathematics Curriculum is organised under 6 interrelated strands:
Number
Algebra
Measurement
Space
Statistics
Probability
These content strands are intertwined and build upon each other. For example, Number and Algebra work together to help students understand number systems and recognise patterns so they can describe relationships and make generalisations.
Statistics and Probability are also linked, relying on shared concepts and skills.
Measurement connects naturally to Space and supports all the other strands. Together with Number, measurement and Space give students practical ways to quantify, compare, communicate, and make sense of real-world situations.
You don’t want to skip over any one of these content strands or your students will be left with gaps in their math skills and understandings. Developing geometry skills is just one part of an effective mathematics curriculum.
For this reason, mathematics isn’t taught in isolation.
It’s important for your students to learn how to recognise and use these natural connections across the six content strands. These strands also help develop students’ mathematical, statistical, and computational thinking through processes like modelling, problem-solving, investigations, and simulations. By actively engaging in these experiences, your students will build their understanding, fluency, reasoning, and problem-solving skills in an integrated and meaningful way.
It is expected that your students will develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of size, shape, position, and movement as they study the Measurement and Space content strands.
The Space strand helps students learn to visualise, describe, and work with shapes, positions, directions, and transformations of objects in the world around them. It’s about understanding how things fit together and relate to one another - whether it’s the location of objects, their size and symmetry, or how they move and change.
Students use these skills to create and interpret pictures, diagrams, maps, models, and graphics that represent real and imagined spaces. Concepts like surfaces, boundaries, curves, symmetry, and similarity are all introduced and explored in meaningful ways.
These ideas are not just for mathematics either. They connect to many real-world applications, including art, design, architecture, engineering, robotics, AI, science, and medicine. By building a strong foundation in the Space strand, your students gain the tools to understand and interact with the world in practical and creative ways.
If you are interested in learning more about the ACARA Math Curriculum and how you can effectively teach all those math content descriptors through play, check out this blog post: Teaching the F-2 ACARA Math Learning Intentions Through Play Blog Post
This blog post explains in detail our F-2 ACARA Math Curriculum and it will show you how to teach ALL the math learning intentions through a play-based pedagogy.
Foundation Stage Geometry Skills
The Australian Curriculum outlines 2 content descriptors for the foundation stage geometry strand. You will need to provide learning experiences for your students to:
Sort, name and create familiar shapes; recognise and describe familiar shapes within objects in the environment, giving reasons. (AC9MFSP01)
Describe the position and location of themselves and objects in relation to other people and objects within a familiar space. (AC9MFSP02)
So, in the foundation stage (kindergarten, prep, or preschool), the geometry skills you will teach should include:
Identifying shapes in the environment
Describing the features of familiar 2D shapes (square, circle, rectangle & triangle)
Sorting familiar 2D shapes
Naming 2D shapes
Describing the features of 3D objects and shapes
Naming 3D objects in the environment
Sorting 3D shapes (spheres, cubes, cones & pyramids)
Discriminating between 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional shapes
Describing the position of objects using the everyday language of location and direction, such as ‘between’, ‘near’, ‘next to’, ‘forward’ and ‘toward’, ‘left’ and ‘right’.
Describing movement
Following simple directions to follow a path
Giving simple directions to guide something or someone along a path
Learning About 2D and 3D Shapes
Learning about shapes is at its core, a skill of visual perception. The visual perception of objects begins to develop in babies and toddlers.
Babies can discriminate between familiar objects like people, pets, and household items. They can even identify these objects when they change position or location. Babies may not know the name of these objects, but they can certainly identify them.
When young children enter preschool and kindergarten, their visual perception is usually quite well developed. However, this is only the beginning of their geometry journey.
These young students will be learning the names of common 2D and 3D shapes (that’s the easy part of geometry in the early years) and they will also be tackling a much more difficult skill. In preschool and kindergarten, children will be learning how to analyse shapes according to their features.
Whether a shape is two-dimensional or three-dimensional is dependent on its features.
Two-dimensional objects only have two dimensions:
length, and
width.
Three-dimensional objects have three dimensions:
length,
width, and
depth.
The primary focus of the Australian curriculum Foundation level geometry strand is on the analysis of shapes, movement, and space.
Teaching about 2D and 3D shapes in the early years is quite complex. Your students will need to learn to analyze shapes, identify their defining properties, and be able to talk about them mathematically.
Learning About Position and Movement
Understanding position and movement is an important life skill. Because it is such a vital life skill, most children start preschool or kindergarten with basic spatial awareness concepts already in place. They will have pre-formed ideas about position and location, symmetry, and direction.
It doesn’t take a child in your class very long to work out where things are stored in the classroom and how to get to the resources they want. Most children will have already learned some mathematical language to describe position, location, and direction too.
Teaching position and movement in the early years isn’t quite as complex as 2D and 3D shapes but your students will still need to master both the mathematical metalanguage as well as the concepts.
How Do You Teach Geometry in Kindergarten?
Through fun hands-on age-appropriate learning experiences!
There’s no better way 😊
Teaching the Foundation stage Geometry concepts will mean you need to be teaching all the new mathematical vocabulary as well as providing plenty of opportunities for investigative play experiences involving shapes, position, and movement.
To begin teaching early years geometry concepts and skills, start by investigating what a shape is. Discuss the features of 3D objects and 2D shapes. Explore positional language and describe the location of objects.
Teach your little ones how to directly compare 2 shapes or objects before moving them on to any form of sorting and classification of 2D shapes and 3D objects.
You will find your students naturally love learning about shapes, position, and location through hands-on activities and real-world experiences. Play-based learning will provide your students with purposeful opportunities to learn and practice many geometry skills.
When children are given opportunities to explore geometry concepts through hands-on playful investigations and learning provocations, you will observe them building their skills, understandings, and geometry knowledge.
Use these rich hands-on experiences to scaffold their learning by asking intentional questions about geometry. For example:
in the blocks area, you can ask, “Which block has a square face?”
in the dramatic play space, you might ask, “Where do we keep the baby dolls?”
or at the collage area, there will be opportunities to discuss the shapes and locations of the various collage supplies.
children learning about shapes through hands-on activities
Some of my favourite open-ended geometry questions to scaffold thinking and learning are:
How do you know this is a square?
Can you tell me more about that location?
How many different shapes can you see here?
What happens if you put those shapes together?
How are these the same? How are they different?
How can we compare these shapes?
The list of questions you can ask is endless and dependent on the skills and understandings of your students. Questions like these are important in play-based learning investigations because they help your young students to verbalise their thinking and challenge them to think about geometry in different ways.
The opportunities to embed geometry vocabulary and provide purposeful learning experiences are endless in a play-based learning environment. Providing your students with a variety of geometry resources and some learning prompts will help your students naturally incorporate more geometry learning into their play.
Resources for Teaching Geometry in Preschool and Kindergarten
Here are some of the resources we use the most in our kindergarten and preschool geometry investigations and lessons.
👉 shape puzzles, stampers, construction sets, 3D shape moulds for kinetic sand, shape templates and models, geoboards, Tap-Tap sets, tangrams, attribute blocks and manipulatives, paper and card shapes, tiles, bean bags in different shapes and real world 3D objects.
7 Tips for Teaching Geometry in Kindergarten
To have success in teaching geometry in the early years, remember to:
Provide authentic and real-life experiences through hands-on activities.
Timetable in time for your students to explore geometrical manipulatives and geometry toys.
Intentionally use any new mathematical language frequently.
Encourage mathematical thinking by teaching your students to use math vocabulary and to talk about and explain their thinking when they are using the geometry resources.
Provide manipulatives instead of paper and pencils or worksheets for problem solving and geometry lessons.
Allow time for children to compare and discuss their work and their thinking with their peers.
Ask open-ended questions when teaching about shapes, position, and movement.
Geometry Activities for Kindergarten and Preschool
If you are looking for some fun hands-on activities to help you teach geometry to your early childhood students, you’ll love my play-based learning math activities.
Your children will have so much fun with these 49 fun hands-on geometry activities that they won’t even realise how much they are learning!
They are highly engaging, purposeful and age-appropriate.
These 56 Geometry provocation prompts teach ALL the Geometry content descriptions for Kindergarten ACARA Version 9 Foundation Stage.
Make your play-based math learning centers or investigation areas so quick and easy to set up with these engaging hands-on learning invitations.
The provocations address 2D and 3D shapes, lines, position, and location.
Download this pack now to instantly receive:
40 Prompts to sort, name and create familiar shapes; recognise and describe familiar shapes within objects in the environment, giving reasons (AC9MFSP01)
16 Prompts to describe the position and location of themselves and objects in relation to other people and objects within a familiar space (AC9MFSP02)
10 reproducible recording sheets to fit A5 clipboards
Instructions to tile print the prompts so you can change the printout size to suit your centers
Inspiring photos for ideas on how to set up your learning invitations
Lists of possible hands-on resources you can add to each center
PLUS BONUS vocabulary cards
All the math provocation prompts you need to set up hands-on GEOMETRY investigation areas in your kindergarten classroom.
Easy to Prep and Organise Geometry Kindergarten Learning Activities
There’s a total of 56 different provocation prompts in this pack. All ready for you to print. Instructions are also included for the option to print 2 or 4 to each sheet.
They make it really easy to prepare and set up aesthetically pleasing and educational math investigation areas. Just print them out and include one or two of these geometry prompts along with some related math manipulatives, and you’ll be taking your student's mathematical thinking to the next level.
You can grab a FREE sample of these prompts HERE in my Free Resources Library.
Teach 2D Shapes with Loose Parts Play
I also have some Reggio-inspired loose parts mats you can use to explore and teach common and uncommon 2D shapes in a play-based, hands-on way.
These beautiful nature themed mats feature 24 different 2D shapes.
The 2D shapes included in this geometry resource are: rectangle, square, triangles, circle, oval/ellipse, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, decagon, dodecagon, trapezoid, parallelogram, diamond/rhombus, heart, star, crescent & arrow
THIS NATURE-THEMED GEOMETRY RESOURCE CONTAINS:
A List of 60 loose parts ideas (like stones, counters, play dough, math manipulatives, etc)
Instructions to tile print the mats so you can change the print-out size
2 learning 2D shapes provocation prompts
24 different shape mats—labelled
The learning prompts and number mats are in A4 size and feature high quality nature photographs.
PERFECT FOR:
small group math rotations
independent work
early finishers
busy bags or math trays
numeracy centers or investigation areas
Linked to these Version 9 ACARA Content Descriptions:
AC9MFSPO1: Sort, name, and create familiar shapes; recognise and describe familiar shapes within objects in the environment.
AC9M1SP01: Make, compare, and classify shapes, identifying similarities and differences.
Now you know all about the Australian Curriculum Geometry strand and why it is an important part of our math curriculum. I hope you have discovered some tips and ideas to help you confidently teach Geometry to your kindergarten and preschool students.
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