One thing I've noticed as a teacher is that geometry is an area of weakness for elementary students, and part of that is we don't often move beyond the knowledge and comprehension levels to application and creation. Students learn the basic shapes in preschool and kindergarten and then suddenly they're expected to differentiate between types of triangles and quadrilaterals when many still don't know what pentagons and hexagons are. Adding in types of angles often leads to kids being overwhelmed with a lot of information at once.
As an upper elementary school teacher, I've decided on a plan of teaching my son the standards earlier than expected as well as pointing them out in real life and thinking about their use in engineering and design. We created this Spying Shapes Google Slides presentation that we call our shape book.
We have had a lot of fun taking pictures of shapes we see at home and in public. This is a great project for homework, home school, and collaboration at school. You can assign this project for individuals or groups, or even across grade levels. Students can add audio clips of them explaining what the objects are and why they think the shapes were chosen.
If you want to differentiate, remove some slides or add others, such as the different types of triangles or hexagons (regular / irregular), etc. Download it here.
If you plan on using this resource with younger kids, here are two books that can help introduce the concept of shapes around us.
Beautiful pictures in this book and descriptive prose don't help point out the actual shapes themselves in print, but lead to a discussion of what is seen in each scene.
