Can You Draw This?

Early Years/Primary (Age 3 – 9)

Curriculum Goal

Kindergarten: Demonstrating Literacy and Mathematics Behaviour

  • Describe, sort, classify, build, and compare two-dimensional shapes and three-dimensional figures, and describe the location and movement of objects through investigation (#17).
  • Apply the mathematical processes to support the development of mathematical thinking, to demonstrate understanding, and to communicate thinking and learning in mathematics, while engaged in play-based learning and in other contexts (#20).

Primary: Geometry and Spatial Sense

  • Compose and decompose various structures, and identify the two-dimensional shapes and three-dimensional objects that these structures contain.

Context

  • Students communicate their spatial thinking by recalling the details of an image shown to them for a brief moment.
  • Students have a hard surface to draw on and have a clear view of teacher or interactive whiteboard.
  • The free downloadable Google Slides file has prompts in the presenter notes for teachers.
  • This lesson can also be easily adapted to an online environment.
Print Lesson
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D

Part of our spatial toolkit...

Image linking to the Spatial Reasoning Lesson Toolkit. The image has various math manipulatives on top of a white table with the title in the middle

Materials

  • “Can You Draw This Images” to be shown to the class:
  • “Blank square templates” for students to draw what they observe:
    • Printable PDF (Appendix C).
    • Virtual Learning: Jamboard File to be copied for each student (Appendix D)

Lesson

The free Google Slides download includes prompts for teachers in the presenter notes.

  • For only a few seconds, present an image from the “Can You Draw This Image” file to your class.
  • Hide the image and give students a few minutes to recreate it on their “Blank Square Templates”
  • Show the image again and invite students to make edits or changes to their drawing.
  • Ask for volunteers to share the process they used to create their drawing.
  • Repeat with subsequent images.

Look Fors

  • How do the students speak about the shapes? Do they use their proper names (e.g., square, triangle, rectangle, trapezoid, rhombus, hexagon)?
  • Do the students use spatial language (e.g., above, below, besides, underneath, top, bottom)?
  • How do the children remember and describe the design?

Extension

  • Have students create their own design/image that they will challenge a classmate to draw. The student will use spatial language to describe to their classmate what they have drawn.
Print Lesson
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D

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