Shapes in 2D

Tiles in the nursery are a great tool for allowing children to explore 2D shapes. Often, 2D shapes can be used to represent 3D concepts. In the images below, you can see a child’s representation of a house using 2D tiles.

The house on the right-hand side of the table makes use of a triangle for the roof and squares and hexagons for the building itself. As the representation is 2D the child has represented a silhouette of a 3D house. It could be interesting to discuss with the child how they would have to alter their representation of the house if they viewed it from a different direction.

If we were to view a triangular prism end-on, then we could represent its silhouette with a triangle. If we were to view the prism from the side, we would need a rectangle instead. This is illustrated in the image below. Children could experiment with viewing these silhouettes by shining light at various shapes and observing the shadow they create.

Using shadows, we can view 3D objects as 2D objects. We can also create nets of these 3D objects using 2D objects. It might be interesting for the children to make the comparison between building a 3D structure from 2D shapes and then seeing how the shadows of this structure give the same 2D shapes.

The tiles are different shapes and colours, and so could be sorted into groups by either colour or number of sides. Counting the number of objects in each group could be a good opportunity for data collection. See our article on data collection to read more about this.

If children were to group the tiles by shape, they may ask if any of the shapes are the same. Even if two shapes have the same number of sides, they are not necessarily the same. The children could compare the number of sides, the angles of the shapes and the side lengths of the shapes.