Finding out what the kids need to know…

Yesterday Suzanne went into Boringdon after school had finished to have a quick word with one of the Reception class teachers, Sarah Worley to ask her a few question we had come up with whilst brainstorming ideas and things we needed to research in order to make the game educationally viable and fun. Unfortunately Simon couldn’t make it this time, but we’re planning to go in after half term so he can chat with Sarah too.

Sarah was really helpful and gave us a folder with the maths the children need to learn in their first year at school, which has a massive chapter on “shape & space”. In the chapter are the 2 main areas we’re concentrating on, 2D and 3D shapes.

We read through the chapter in detail today and wrote a load of notes down. It states which shapes the children need to learn, the folder says they should learn 3D shapes first then 2D. Sarah said from her experience of teaching this, she finds it better to start with 2D so that’s what we’ll do.

So in amongst all the other information in each section there’s a list of what the children need to know in order to describe the shapes. As of September the curriculum is changing, the children no longer need to be able to name the shape i.e. “that’s a circle”, instead they just need to be able to describe what it looks like, i.e. “it has one side and looks like a wheel”. Although Sarah recommended we use the actual shape names to get the children used to them.

The 3D vocabulary for the required shapes is as follows, straight from the folder:

Boxes – box, flat side, corner, face, slide.
Balls – ball, round, shape, roll.
Cylinders – tube, cylinder, curved side, flat end, roll.
Cones – cone, curved side, flat end, point, shape, roll.

The 2D vocabulary for the required shapes is as follows, again straight from the folder:

Square – square, the same, straight lines, faces.
Rectangle – rectangle, straight sides, the same length as.
Circle – face, circle, round.
Triangle – triangle, straight sides, 3 sides.

As you can see the folder states the children need to know the names of the shapes, but like we said this is changing as of September. We also made the following notes having read through the folder, and possible solutions to the things we’re finding out:

3D shapes:
Children experience the world in 3D. The world is made of 3D shapes. They experience objects through using toys and home and at school. Most children understand the words box and ball but struggle with cone and cylinder.

How we could test their 3D knowledge?
The shapes come in different sizes and different colours, question how the shape moves i.e. slides or rolls. How many sides does the shape have? Get the children to point out where certain shapes are in a picture. Get them to create a house using 3D objects. Allow them to test their predictions i.e. Will the ball roll?

How to do it:
Create a list of movie clips based on the shapes that they will be learning. Extend these clips by animating the movement that these shapes will take if pushed. Create some shapes, which can be dragged around the stage to help create another object (house).

2D Shapes:
Children are already familiar with shapes but not in a formal sense. They are most familiar with squares and rectangles.

How we could test their 2D knowledge?
We could get the children to trace around a shape. We could further there hand to eye co-ordination skills by getting them to colour in the shape. This could be a free choice of audio prompt ‘Colour the circle blue…’ etc. Like the 3D shapes we could get the children to create a bigger picture using smaller shapes.

How to do it:
Create a list of movie clips of all the different shapes to show the children how to trace the shape. This can be backed up with audio cues. The flash screen will be drawable, which means that the children can trace around the shape using the mouse or stylus.