Working with geometric figures in preschool
AUTHORS
Emma Mamede | emamede@ie.uminho.pt | University of Minho
Filipa Balinha | filipa.balinha@gmail.com | University of Minho
SUMMARY
This article seeks to understand what knowledge about geometric figures preschool children have. To this end, it attempts to answer two questions: 1) What knowledge about geometric figures do preschool children have? 2) What specific vocabulary related to geometry do these children learn? An intervention was carried out with a group of 20 children, aged 3 to 4, attending preschool education. The intervention consisted of 8 sessions of approximately 60 minutes, dedicated to the exploration of geometric figures, their characteristics and nominalization. At this level, the evaluation of the project highlighted the improvement of the children's abilities as the main results, using specific tasks and materials. Furthermore, the children in this group were able to identify properties of geometric figures, learn geometric vocabulary and could be included from level I to level II proposed by Van Hiele, however, some seemed not to have yet reached level I. Thus, the spatial sense seems to be able to be promoted with specific tasks on spatial notions and geometric figures, as long as the work is well planned, challenging for the children and the appropriate materials are used.
KEYWORDS
spatial sense, geometric figures; geoplane, preschool
RELEVANT DATES
Published: 2016/06/26