Nursery World - Enabling Environments: Collections

Children should be provided with a large variety of shapes in a range of situations to stimulate learning. Nicole Weinstein suggests some ideas.

Shapes are everywhere-regular and irregular, in 2D and 3D. While some shapes are familiar to us, such as the circle and triangle, there are others we may not even recognise, never mind actually name (such as dodecahedrons - 3D shapes with 12 flat sides). Then there are shapes that we can only describe, maybe as squarish, oval-like or a bit pointy.

Practitioners can use all sorts of collections to contribute to discussions on shape. This could be junk boxes in the art area, natural materials for making pictures and patterns, buttons, leaves and shells. But rather than just learning the names of the shapes, children should be provided with a variety of large and small 2D and 3D shapes, such as circles and spheres, squares and cubes, equilateral triangles and (their 3D equivalent) tetrahedrons, to build with, make pictures with, draw and move around, fit together and investigate their different properties.

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