3-D shapes graphing game

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In recent months I have been making an effort to teach my kids to recognize and name common 3-D shapes like sphere, cube, prism, etc. But my goal has been to teach these shapes entirely through play, rather than through any sort of boring or rote method. In a previous post I shared some playful ways I have been teaching 3-D shapes. I’ve also shared a fun game where my kids identified 3-D shapes by touch and an activity that focused my kids on the surfaces that make up various 3-D shapes.

In this post I’m sharing a 3-D shapes graphing game we played that reinforced the names of six different 3-D shapes while also working on basic graphing skills.

Note: For more playful ways to learn about shapes, see my teaching shapes to kids page.

For this game, I selected six different 3-D shapes to focus on. All of the shapes were found in our Spielgaben set.

The six shapes were (from left to right, top to bottom):

cube
sphere
semi-cylinder (I had to look up the name of this one, because I was not familiar with this term prior to the activity)
cylinder
triangular prism
cuboid (I had to look this one up too)

I took a picture of each of these six shapes and printed them out on on our computer. We then cut them to size, and taped each of the six images to the side of a large wooden cube from our Spielgaben set.

After taping a shape to each of the six sides of our large wooden cube, we created a dice. But our dice had shapes on the sides rather than numbers.

The kids took turns rolling the dice and then adding the correct shape to our grid. (We made our grid from the lid of our Spielgaben set, but you could also use my graphing practice paper.)

Every time the dice was rolled, I would say the name of each shape to reinforce the learning. I also kept asking my kids questions like “Which shape has the most?”; “How many more does the cylinder need before it reaches the end?”; and “Which other shape is tied with the semi-cylinder?”