Practice Geometry with Shape Riddles!

A fun guessing game to build your child’s geometry vocabulary, this can be played anywhere – long car trips are especially good!

What You Need:

• Nothing — just the names and descriptions of a few geometric shapes

1. Step 1:
2. Tell your child that you’re going to play a riddle game called “What Shape am I?”. You will start by providing a certain number of clues about a geometric shape. Decide with your child how many clues you want to provide (3-4 is a good start). Try to incorporate as many geometric terms as you can for your clues. For example, if you’ve picked a square, you might give your child clues like:
   • I am a quadrilateral
   • All my sides are equal in length
   • I have four right angles
   • What Shape am I?
3. Based on your clues your child will guess the geometric shape. Then, your child can think of a different shape and come up with clues of his or her own. For a challenge, keep increasing the number of clues each player needs to provide. Here’s another example with 5 clues:
   • I am a polygon
   • I am a quadrilateral
   • I only have one pair of parallel sides
   • I have two acute angles
   • I have two obtuse angles
   • What Shape am I? (A trapezoid)
4. Continue playing until your child has a good grasp of geometric terms, and can maybe even stump you!