From the apple on your desk and the coffee cup in your hand, to the cabinets along the classroom wall, basic three-dimensional shapes are found everywhere in the world around us. Introduce young mathematicians to the these common figures...

All shapes have certain defining attributes that set them apart from others. In order to understand this, young mathematicians look at examples and non-examples of triangles, rectangles, and squares, working as a whole class to create...

Challenge the spatial thinking of your young mathematicians with this printable tangram puzzle. Using different sized triangles, squares, and parallelograms, children must figure out how to fit all the shapes together to create a square.

It's amazing the complex figures that can be made using only a few simple shapes. Following a class reading of the children's book Grandfather Tang's Story by Ann Tompert, young mathematicians use sets of tangrams to create models...

Use the alphabet as a tool for teaching your class about geometric figures. Break apart capital letters into line segments and arcs. Classify angles as right, acute, or obtuse. Identify parallel and perpendicular lines. An excellent...

Add a sense of excitement to your math class with this race across the country. Using their knowledge of all things circular, young mathematicians work in pairs answering a series of pi-related word problems as they hop from one city to...

Can you build it? Yes you can! This interactive game includes four design challenges presented on separate cards. The cards outline the challenges with limited restrictions but with an end goal in mind. The competitions include building...

While it may seem incredibly obvious to the geometry student that congruent sides make congruent triangles, the proving of this by definition actually takes a bit of work. This exercise steps the class through this kind of proof by...

Explore the mathematics of the paper snowflake! During the five lessons progressing in complexity from K through 12, pupils use spatial geometry to make predictions. Scholars consider a folded piece of paper with shapes cut out....

Boxing takes on a whole new meaning! The second installment of the three-part series has groups create lidless boxes from construction paper that can hold the most rice. After testing out their constructions, they build a new box....

Use this rhyming description of Max's Fantastical Zoo to make some amazing animals from geometric shapes. There is a teacher's guide for easy lesson planning.

Learn about platonic solids, a special type of polyhedra. Read a definition, make three-dimensional models using printouts, and play with an interactive animation, which will show you the faces, vertices, and edges on platonic solids:...