Creating a manipulative material to play with geometric figures! ⬜

Hello, here I am again.

In the last post, we were talking about the importance of turning Geometry into something manipulative, touchable and visual so children can really understand it.

Today, we are going to learn how to create a really simple device that children can use in class to play with shapes and figures. The materials that we need are really simple:

1. 5 tongue depressors or just sticks.
2. Veclcro.
3. Scissors.

Then, what we need to do is to put the depressors together by their ends, using velcro. We will see how children can move the sticks: they can stick and unstick them, creating a different amount of figures such as squares, rectangles, triangles, rhoumbus, pentagons... Also, they can add as many sticks sticks as they want, so we could create an infinite number of figures.

This way, children can see the connections between the figures, they can see how to create a new one from the previous one, they can become aware of the number of sides that each figure has... And they can create the material in class by themselves, as it is easy and not dangerous. 

I have learned this idea through a YouTube video that you can see here, and I think that it is a fantastic idea to introduce children to the first steps of Geometry: