Shape Puzzles Freebie (NINE Flat Shapes Included!)



I am really excited to share a 24 page set of FREE printable shape puzzles that you can make for kids to use both at home and at school!  These puzzles are great to help kids practice shape recognition and visual discrimination skills such as shape matching and learning to see the difference between one shape and another.




My daughter, Kimmie, made these Shape Puzzles for me last summer to help me prepare for a new session that I gave at I Teach K! in Las Vegas.  I intended to share these with you then, but time got away from me each time I tried to wrap them up and post them for you!  But I finally got it done this week.  Yay!


Check out our Colors and Shapes DVD above!


These shape puzzles are also great practice in learning to see the difference between sizes, since each shape puzzle has many different sizes of the same shape on each puzzle mat.  In fact, some children may find that these puzzles are just a little bit tricky to complete correctly, since the sizes of the shapes vary so slightly!  I think that they will be very good practice for most kids!




The set that I am giving you today includes both color and black and white masters for the following nine "flat" shapes: circle, square, triangle, rectangle, oval, rhombus (diamond), hexagon, trapezoid, and the octagon. Also, one puzzle has all of the shapes together on one sheet, and I created a second version of this with numbers and objects to count for children to match, as in the picture below.




To prepare:
Print the pages on cardstock and laminate. I recommend that you put velcro on the puzzles to make this even better!  I think that kids have a lot more fun with this type of thing when they can attach the shapes with velcro and make them stick- rather than simply placing them down and then picking them back up again.

Check out the video below for a great way for active kids to learn how to sort their shapes!




Suggested Variations:

You may wish to write letters or words on both the puzzle pieces and the shapes on the puzzle bases and have kids match them. Just write whatever you want on them with a marker after you print out the puzzles!
-capitals and lowercase letters.
-sight words written starting with a capital, matched to the same word starting with a lowercase letter.
-CVC words and matching pictures. (We have a lot of these in our CVC books!)
-Sums or differences matched to addition or subtraction equations, etc.

Click here to download the Shapes Puzzles Freebie!



These Shape Creatures worksheets are now available as a download from HeidiSongs.com. :)


-Heidi


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Check out these other great posts from Heidi!



Click here to read the post, "How to Teach the Numbers 0-10 and the Shapes."



Click here to read "Shape Aliens in UFO's , and Other Fun Ways to Learn Shapes (Freebies!)"



Click here to read "How to Help Children Learn the Shapes (and REMEMBER Them!)"

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