Good at Math® Foundations Unit 6: 2D Shapes

Good at Math® Foundations is an 8 unit Preschool-PreK math curriculum designed for classroom and homeschool learning environments. Each unit includes thoughtfully structured skill guides, hands-on teaching tools, visual supports, games, center materials, independent practice, no-prep printables, and extension activities to deepen understanding. The skill guides are intentionally designed for you, the teacher, to guide learners through each skill focus and include a clear lesson goal, materials list, skill description and rationale, connections to future learning in Good at Math® Kindergarten, whole group practice, centers, games, and shelf work, movement and fine motor integration, and play. Good at Math® Foundations was created by an experienced early childhood educator and refined through real classroom and homeschool use to ensure it meets the developmental needs of preschool and pre-kindergarten learners. All lessons and materials are designed using Universal Design for Learning to support a wide range of learners and learning styles while building a strong, joyful foundation in math.

Unit 6: 2D Shapes builds foundational geometry skills by helping children recognize, name, describe, create, sort, and identify circles, squares, triangles, and rectangles in meaningful contexts. Children explore each shape individually, learning to notice defining attributes such as straight and curved edges, sides, corners, and relative side lengths while recognizing that a shape remains the same even when its size, color, orientation, or appearance changes. They then deepen their understanding by creating shapes with play dough, craft materials, loose parts, art experiences, and other hands-on materials, encouraging them to use shape attributes to guide their constructions. As the unit progresses, children apply their knowledge by sorting and classifying shapes based on shared attributes, comparing shapes, explaining how they know where a shape belongs, and identifying shapes within familiar objects and their everyday environment. Through shape hunts, building experiences, movement, sensory exploration, art, games, centers, and real-world observation, children begin to understand that shapes are all around them and are important parts of the objects, structures, and spaces they encounter each day. This unit supports the development of shape recognition, visual discrimination, spatial reasoning, classification, observation, mathematical vocabulary, fine-motor skills, and early geometric reasoning while laying a strong foundation for future work with geometry, composing and decomposing shapes, measurement, and spatial relationships. Within each skill focus, children are introduced to new concepts, practice them through whole group and movement-based experiences, engage in centers and shelf work, and demonstrate understanding through meaningful independent application. This unit includes multiple skill guides along with additional center and practice activities designed to reinforce and extend learning in developmentally appropriate ways.

With Good at Math® Foundations, you can take the guesswork out of your math block while confidently providing a developmentally appropriate, engaging, and thoughtfully sequenced introduction to early math skills, laying the foundation needed for future math success.

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Good at Math® Foundations will be a complete 8 unit curriculum, with a slated completion date of November 2026. The units will include: 
Unit 1: Spatial Awareness
Unit 2: Sorting & Classification
Unit 3: Patterns
Unit 4: Numbers 1-5
Unit 5: Numbers 6-10
Unit 6: 2D Shapes
Unit 7: Measurement & Comparison
Unit 8: Early Operations

If you would like to see this and other resources in action, please visit us on Instagram at @projectbasedprimary.