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 perfect!

Step 1:
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?

Step 2:
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)

Continue playing until your child has a good grasp of geometric terms, and can maybe even stump you!