Today I am really excited to share a 24 page set of FREE printable shape puzzles that you can make for kids to use both at home and at school! These puzzles are great to help kids practice shape recognition and visual discrimination skills such as shape matching and learning to see the difference between one shape and another.
My daughter, Kimmie, made these Shape Puzzles for me last summer to help me prepare for a new session that I gave at I Teach K! in Las Vegas. I intended to share these with you then, but time got away from me each time I tried to wrap them up and post them for you! But I finally got it done this week. Yay!
These shape puzzles are also great practice in learning to see the difference between sizes, since each shape puzzle has many different sizes of the same shape on each puzzle mat. In fact, some children may find that these puzzles are just a little bit tricky to complete correctly, since the sizes of the shapes vary so slightly! I think that they will be very good practice for most kids!
The set that I am giving you today includes both color and black and white masters for the following nine “flat” shapes: circle, square, triangle, rectangle, oval, rhombus (diamond), hexagon, trapezoid, and the octagon. Also, one puzzle has all of the shapes together on one sheet, and I created a second version of this with numbers and objects to count for children to match, as in the picture below.
To prepare:
Print the pages on cardstock and laminate. I recommend that you put velcro on the puzzles to make this even better! I think that kids have a lot more fun with this type of thing when they can attach the shapes with velcro and make them stick- rather than simply placing them down and then picking them back up again.
Check out the video below for a great way for active kids to learn the numbers and shapes!
Suggested Variations:
You may wish to write letters or words on both the puzzle pieces and the shapes on the puzzle bases and have kids match them. Just write whatever you want on them with a marker after you print out the puzzles!
-capitals and lowercase letters.
-sight words written starting with a capital, matched to the same word starting with a lowercase letter.
-CVC words and matching pictures. (We have a lot of these in our CVC books!)
-Sums or differences matched to addition or subtraction equations, etc.
Click here to download the Shapes Puzzles Freebie!
———————————-
Follow me! Did you enjoy this post? Do me a favor and share it with your friends! And follow this blog by signing up email updates, or follow on Bloglovin’, or follow me on TPT! I’m also on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube, too! Don’t forget to sign up for our email newsletter (on the left sidebar) for special deals and promo codes that you won’t find out about anywhere else.
Check out these other great posts from Heidi!
