Montessori Monday - Counting Corners with Pushpins

My kids love pushpin activities - they provide great fine motor practice for the pincer grip used in writing.  Today I switched things up a little by including some shapes cut out from construction paper and inviting L and E (3.5 years old) to use the pushpins to count the corners..

Here is what their activity tray looked like.  I didn't give the kids free access to this one because I want to keep a close eye on the pushpins so they don't end up on the floor.  I took it out as a "special activity" and the girls were very excited.

The kids set to work right away and knew exactly what to do.  It was a great opportunity to review that triangles have three corners, rectangles have four corners, hexagons have six, etc...  We also discussed the term "quadrilateral".   I included all sorts of shapes including both polygons that were familiar to them and other more unusual shapes.

 

I intentionally included some concave polygons to get a discussion going.  L didn't think the interior angle of the concave polygon counts as a corner, so we tried to come up with a definition of a 'corner' (the point where two edges meet).  I'm pretty sure L was not convinced, but I'm glad I got her thinking.

 

This was such a fun little Montessori-inspired exercise in Geometry, that we'll definitely be repeating it again soon.

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