Introduction to 3D Shapes

Spheres, cylinders, cubes, cuboids, pyramids and triangular prisms!

I figured these are the main common 3D shapes (AKA solids) the girls should be aware of at their age so were a good starting point in understanding the concept. I chose these shapes because they can be grouped in two ways:

1) By the 2D shape they're based on, i.e. cylinder + sphere (circle), cuboid + cube (square), triangular prism + pyramid (triangle)

2) By whether they're a prism or not, i.e. cylinder (circular prism) + cuboid (rectangular prism) + triangular prism, sphere + cube + pyramid

I gathered together some example of each solid from around the house, trying to get a variety of sizes and types if I could. I put them all together on the floor and called the girls to have a look at them. After they had some time to pick them up and examine them, talking about the similarities and differences between them, I held up one shape, named it and described its features, then asked the twins if they could find any other examples of the same solid in the pile in front of them. I took a photo of each group they made. Then I repeated this process until we had covered all 6 3D shapes.

Sphere: it's perfectly round like a ball; Cube: it has square faces on every side and every side is the same size; Pyramid: it has triangular faces on every side and every side is the same size; Cylinder: it has a circle the same size on each end joined together by straight lines; Cuboid: it has a same-sized square or rectangle on each end joined together by straight lines; Triangular Prism: it has a same-sized triangle at each end joined together by straight lines.

Once we'd gone through them all, we played some quick games where I would call out a the name of a solid and they had to find one in the pile. Then another game where I would hide one behind my back, describe it and they had to guess what it was.

When they seemed confident with this, I asked them to work together to sort the objects into 3 groups. I was hinting they needed to look at the 2D shape it was similar to and MashaAllah they managed to get the correct 3 groups between them. 😁😁 When they were done, I took photos of the groups they made.

I then demonstrated how they could sort the solids into only 2 groups, based on whether they were prisms or not. I explained that a prism is a solid that has the same 2D shape on each end and these identical faces are joined together with straight lines. (They know the word "identical" because they know they're NOT identical twins because they're not exactly the same 😂). I asked them if a triangular prism is called that because the faces are triangles, what do they think another name for a cylinder could be? I was impressed they figured out it could be a circular prism! And so a cuboid could be a square prism or rectangular prism. 👍

That evening, I created the above worksheet for them to fill in the next day as a recap activity, using the photos I took earlier.

You can download our Word file here to use as a template; feel free to replace the photos with your own!