Shapes in Real Life, Photo Matching Strips

This shape-matching activity is designed to help children visually identify real-life examples of the metal inset shapes in an interactive and engaging way.

Preparation:

Print the photo cards and shape strips on heavy card stock for durability, or standard computer paper if you intend to later laminate them. Cut the photo cards to separate them, and cut the shape strips if you would like them separated too. Laminate (optional). Prepare strips with velcro (optional).

Extra Tips and Extensions:

• Depending upon a child’s age and familiarity with the metal inset shapes, you may wish to introduce the activity with 3 shape strips and then either rotate or add strips according to the child's ease and ability to differentiate between the shapes. Children can build towards sorting all the photo cards at once, as they progress to mastery.
• Make sure children are familiar with the process of packing away the activity; removing the photo cards from the strips is especially important if children are sharing a learning space with other children who might like to complete the activity after them.
• Where appropriate and possible, nurture independence and consolidation by storing the cards in a designated and accessible place and presenting a follow-up work to reinforce learning (e.g., colouring pages of shapes, making a shape booklet, or a write the room activity).
• Play an odd one out game by laying out four cards and asking the child which is the odd one out.
• Use the photo cards to play I-spy – lay an appropriate number of cards depending on the child's ability and 'spy' shape properties (something round, something with straight lines), or shapes (something star-shaped, something square).
• Use the shape strips as game boards for a lotto-style game; lay the photo cards face down and take turns to select a card to fill your chosen shape strip. Depending on a child's ability, players can be assigned more than one shape strip to fill.
• The photo cards can also be used to play a memory game; lay 2-4 photo cards of each shape face down, take turns to turn over two cards, if the cards show the same shape, then the player gets to keep them. Continue until all the pairs are matched.
• For an active sorting activity, place the strips in different designated areas (you may like to make the areas easily visually identifiable by placing a larger cut-out of the shape above the strip). Have the child pull a photo card at random (closing their eyes / picking from a mystery bag), and move to place their shape on the correct strip. You can leave the child to move as they would like (running / walking) as long as they are safe, or you can give them an instruction for a designated action (i.e hopping, skipping, dancing).

Further Product Details:

This resource contains 6 different pages. There are 2 pages of photo cards and 4 pages of shape strips; all pages can be seen in the thumbnails.

✱ Full list of included vocabulary: oval, circle, square, rectangle, triangle, ellipse, curvilinear triangle, pentagon, trapezium/trapezoid, quatrefoil, heart, star.

✱ Please be aware that no physical product will be sent to you in the post; this is a digital file.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out. If you would like to share the activity in action or how you've prepared / arranged the resource, I would love to see! You can leave a review with your pictures or email me on the contact page.

✱ This printable is for personal use only. Products sold by 'Happy Monti' may not be resold, amended or shared without written permission directly from me, the shop's owner. Thank you!

Image attributions: Heart (ornament) – Kasia, Quatrefoil (medal / pendant) – Naomi King.