Ask the children to make a diary where they note or draw every hexagon they find during their days. Objects can include nuts and bolts, chicken wire, beehives, stop signs, pencils or soccer balls. Encourage the children to look at decorations around them, including wallpaper, carpets, paintings and street and bathroom tiling. Flowers are often represented with hexagonal shapes, and some breakfast cereals come out of the box in geometric forms. As a reminder, you can ask them to make a small hexagon from cardboard or card stock and carry it with them.
Use arts and crafts to teach children shapes with hands on activities. Make a quilt with hexagonal fabric pieces, or a mosaic with construction paper cut into hexagonal shapes. Other arts and crafts can include collages, where children either find pictures that depict a hexagon, or cut material into hexagons. Other arts and crafts activities can include abstract paintings that involve all kinds of geometrical shapes, or hexagonal sculptures made from clay or PLAY-DOH and decorated with beads or glitter.
Make puzzles by cutting out hexagonal shapes from card stock or cardboard. Cut the hexagons into pieces and ask the children to reassemble them. The more pieces you cut the hexagon into, the more difficult it will be to reassemble. You can also write messages on the hexagon before you cut it, including "Congratulations, you made it", to make it slightly easier for the students. Alternatively, paste or draw a picture on the hexagon. You can also cut a picture into a series of hexagonal shapes, and ask the children to place the pieces in the right order.
Online resources with educational content offer a variety of games that allow children to play with hexagons while becoming familiar with the shape. Games can include moving diamonds over a hexagonal board, or building a hexagon with mixed-up puzzle pieces. In online quiz games, the students have to pick out the hexagon from a group of shapes, or they are introduced to a variety of irregular forms a hexagon can take on.