Familiarize students with the characteristics of two and three-dimensional shapes using building, drawing and comparison exercises. Describe the attributes of these shapes using the appropriate vocabulary. Investigate or reinforce these attributes using visuals.
Develop students' ability to describe spatial attributes and relationships such as direction and distance through analyzing simple relationships such as "far from", "near to", "in front of", and "to the side of". Use specific locations or coordinate maps to interpret these relationships.
Use or create shapes that have symmetry to develop shape and pattern recognition. Apply transformations such as turns (rotation), flips (reflection), and slides (translation) to shapes to create patterns to analyze. One can do this using a series of images or objects that will be rotated, reflected or dragged in a consecutive manner to create a unique pattern.
Represent shapes using different sizes and perspectives to help improve students' visualization. Incorporate into this representation ideas involving numbers and measurement appropriate to the student's grade level.
Further analyze and describe the attributes of two- and three-dimensional shapes and start to classify or group them accordingly using categories such as "number of sides," "number of faces," or type (isosceles, equilateral or right triangle, quadrilateral, etc.) so that the student becomes familiar with exact geometric properties. Define and explore congruence and similarity.
Familiarize students with representational methods and tools. Describe, specify or determine location, distance and paths of movement using coordinate grids. Calculate distance along horizontal and vertical paths on the coordinate grid.
Further develop student pattern recognition using transformations (motions) applied to geometric shapes. Identify symmetry in geometric transformations. Use transformation to show two or more shapes are congruent.
Build and draw geometric objects, paths or pattern using one or a series of shapes to develop student visualization. For application, use geometric models either drawn or physically constructed to show relationships and to solve problems further involving numbers and measurement appropriate to the student's grade level.