The Smart Happy Project

Bringing nature and numbers together

  • Shop
  • Free Resources
  • Gallery
    • Symmetry in Nature
    • Art and Crafts with Nature
    • Stitching Stars
    • Nature Study
    • Outdoor Activities in Nature
    • Crisis Crafts
  • 365
    • 365 Nature journal month by month
      • January
      • February
      • March
      • April
      • May
      • June
      • July
      • August
      • September
      • October
      • November
      • December
    • Me and my World – making my connection to nature
    • Observation Activities
      • Nature Observation tools
  • About
    • Blog
    • Observation skills
      • Spirals in Nature
    • Mission
    • Geometric thinking

shape hunting

April 17, 2013 By Lisa

We’re going on a shape hunt!

Once you start its easy to see the natural shapes that occur all around us.

This is a beginners exercise to see how many you can find

 We started by familiarizing ourselves with some shapes by painting onto stones so we knew what we were looking for. Then we cut the shapes from coloured card to take with us. there are templates of shapes. This can be done with so many age groups so tailor it to suit your needs.

We started with a circle, triangle, pentagon, 5 pointed and 6 pointed star. these are all good ones to begin with and appear quite a lot in nature around us.

colour shapes for shape hunting     Once out walking (we went to the woods) we used the shapes to match to those we found around us.

It’s a looking exercise really, learning to train the eye, to see the geometry of whats around us and always there.

But once you get it, you see them everywhere and the children pick it up too.

natural pentagon

There they are, bold flowers proud as punch or small weeds hidden away. Tucked away in the smallest corners are perfect triangles as ivy leaves or a cluster of circles nestled at the foot of a tree trunk.

ivy triangle

circles in nature natural pentagon

As has been the tradition of this ‘winter that never ends’, we didn’t stay outside too long and brought a few collected items inside to examine and give them our full attention.

Also the kids had wondered off at this point and were climbing trees, a much more vigorous and therefore warmer exercise! I was still hooked though, looking everywhere.

circles in nauretriangles in natureafter a while I found that what helped was to be able to look at the leaf or flower through a shape drawn on acetate, as that demonstrated clearly the similarity rather than fingers and gloves getting in the way.

star in nature

primrose pentagon

star in daffodil go to the printables page for the shapes to trace onto acetate.

It really is about training your eye, and the eyes of the children around you. Once you start to see them you can’t stop. Now, I just keep seeing shapes everywhere.

clover triangle
can you join the dots?

5 point star in flower petals  so the snail is not one of the shapes we’d looked at  before, it’s a spiral and we’ll come back to that later as there are lots of geometry to explore in spirals, but he was just too lovely to leave out.

Happy Hunting!

Stay with us, there’s lots more Shape Hunting to do; in food, on the body and in buildings around us. sign up to follow our posts and find out more.

original content of the smarthappyproject.com

circles in stones at the beach wood

snail

Filed Under: children's activity, Shape Hunting Tagged With: 4-8 years, pentagon, star, triangle

Social

  • View thesmarthappyproject’s profile on Facebook
  • View @smarthappykid’s profile on Twitter
  • View The Smart Happy Project’s profile on Instagram
  • View The Smart Happy Project’s profile on Pinterest
golden spiral

Fibonacci Numbers in Nature

August 3, 2013 By Lisa

Geometric Transformation of a triangle

Geometric Transformation of a Triangle

May 19, 2016 By Lisa

girl watering seeds

Sowing Seeds of Observation

February 25, 2016 By Lisa

Infinite Fives in Nature

get your FREE ebook on Five in Nature – sign up here!

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Blog
  • Testimonials
  • Contact
  • Terms
  • Press
  • Privacy
  • The Magazine

Copyright © 2023 · The Smart Happy Project · Lisa Lillywhite