Hands-on Learning of Geometric Shapes

Vito is currently in the mood for learning geometric shapes.  I guess he was inspired by his older brother who is currently studying basic geometry at home. Vito has passed the stage of basic shapes, the ones you see in children’s puzzles and the like.  He’s been playing with those since he was a toddler, so I decided to introduce him to geometric shapes in the Montessori classroom.  It would have been nice if we own the Geometric Cabinet, but because we can’t afford one and we don’t have space for it, these insets which are basically materials for writing is a good alternative (best to none).  Note that these are not the traditional metal insets, we are using the plastic version.


Yes, you heard it right.  These insets are language materials in a Montessori classroom, and they are called Metal Insets.  These are used to prepare the child for writing and contains some of the shapes in the geometric cabinet.



For writing, I provided the boys with an insets tracing tray and some inset paper for the insets.  We would create different designs patterns of shapes to see how each combination would go.  You can get these in Amazon or any Montessori shop. But after writing, he would always work on matching the shapes to their frames.


I reused our geometric shapes cards from Montessori Print Shop which I used with Mavi years back.  It’s so nice to see them back in the shelf and in use again.  We use these cards to learn the names of the shapes, especially those that are new to him like quatrefoil, ellipse, etc. No need to memorize the names yet, just familiarization (Vito only knows the names of the basic shapes).



If you’ve been following us on Instagram, we also worked on these printables from The Helpful Garden, sorting real life objects according to their geometric shapes.


We also worked on 3D solids, one activity using printables from Montessori Print Shop and Montessori Geometric Solids.

You can also check this post on how I introduced the Montessori Geometric Solids to Vito months ago.

If you are looking for other 2D or 3D shape learning resource you can also get the following from my shop, Real Life 2D Shapes Learning Pack and Real Life 3D Shapes Learning Pack.

And if you are looking for materials related to this activity, please find a summary of related materials below:

• Metals Insets with Stand
• Plastic Version of the Insets
• Montessori Geometric Cabinet with 35 insets
• Insets Tracing Tray
• Inset Paper
• Box for Inset Paper

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