Top Tips For Teaching 3D Shapes

Hi, I'm Rebecca, and in this film we're going to look at 3D shapes and some common misconceptions. Now, here we have a cube and a cuboid, and one of the problems children have is that they're often shown 2D representations of a 3D shape like this, so some of the shape is missing. So to combat this, give your pupils lots of opportunities to handle real shapes so that they can explore their properties and where you can use real life objects such as cereal boxes and building blocks. Another thing that pupils find hard is when they're asked to count the vertices and the faces of a shape, they get lost and they can't remember how many there are. So one thing I like to do with the children in my class is to give them little blobs of Blu Tack and then they can add them to each vertex as they count and then they don't get lost. Finally, with cubes and cuboids, get children really thinking by asking them what is the same and what is different about these shapes. Challenge their thinking and get them to explain their reasoning. Now, let's have a look at this pyramid and the triangular prism. With a pyramid, I get my children to really visualise real life pyramids like the ones from Egypt, so that they can think about them and what they would look like if they were actually standing on the ground. With the triangular prism, one really good tip is to think about if you chopped the triangular prism through the middle, it would be the same shape all the way through. And you can model this using a very famous chocolate bar. So there you go. There's just a few little tips and tricks for teaching 3D shape.