Spatial sense activities for preschoolers: The Mind-Body Connection! 6 Activities to Help Kids Build Spatial Awareness
The Mind-Body Connection! 6 Activities to Help Kids Build Spatial Awareness
Photo by Lauren Naefe / Stocksy United
By Cheryl Flanders
You know that moment on the tiny tots’ soccer field, when your four-year-old tries to kick the ball…only to miss entirely? (And you think, how did she manage to miss that!?)
Or when you toss a stuffed animal at your son only to find he tries to grab it a full second too late?
It doesn’t mean your child will grow up to be uncoordinated or isn’t destined to play sports: A lack of coordination (and imperfect timing) are common among young children because they’re still developing something called spatial awareness.
Turns out, it takes a lot of brain power for kids to learn where objects are in relation to their own bodies and how to move their bodies to achieve a desired result (whether whacking a tee-ball, coordinating their limbs to complete a breast stroke, or even tracing a stencil). Hence the missed kicks, near collisions on the playground, and unwanted bruises that come from accidentally running into the living room furniture.
Developing spatial awareness starts early. When a baby makes his first reach for a rattle, he’s learning to gauge distance and how his body moves through space in relationship to three-dimensional objects. He knows that rattle is somewhere out there, but he learns his arm can stretch just so far—so he learns how to adjust his body position to reach it.
While most children will develop spatial awareness on their own, it can be interesting to understand the types of activities that build those neural connections. Here are a few ways that young children can build the kind of brain that helps them be their physical best!
1. Give Your Baby Freedom to Explore
Highchairs and cribs have their place, but babies also need plenty of time (and a safe place) to crawl around and explore their environment. A little exploration helps him figure out where he is in relation to the objects around him and learn concepts like near, far, high, and low.
Photo by Per Swantesson / Stocksy United
2.
Play Hide-and-Seek Games
Finding a good hiding spot is perfect for developing spatial awareness (and kids love it!). For younger children, you can make the game easier by hiding a stuffed animal or a favorite toy. (Fair warning: Young children will ask to play this over and over and over again!)
3. Fit Things Together and Take Them Apart
Small puzzles, building blocks like Legos or Duplo, or other toys with fit-together pieces are great choices. Whether she’s tackling a puzzle or a miniature tower, start by helping her study the shapes and edges of the pieces to figure out where the pieces might fit with others, and then put it all together. Once it’s complete, let her try taking it apart and putting it together again, this time by herself.
4. Fill Objects and Then Empty Them
Dumping objects and pouring water is great spatial-awareness practice for your toddler. Not only are those experiments helping him learn that sometimes items can fit inside others, they’re also teaching him what happens when he holds the bowl higher or lower before emptying it.
Will the objects scatter or land in a pile? (A little perk: These are also pre-science and pre-math skills!)
Photo by Sally Anscombe / Stocksy United
5. Stack and Rearrange Objects
Arranging objects according to words like “short” and “long” is a big part of spatial awareness, and there’s lots of fun and easy ways she can practice those concepts. Roll playdough into long ropes, and then separate them into short and long pieces. Stack blocks from large to small. What happens if she stacks from small to large?
6. Play Spatial Sports
Soccer, baseball, gymnastics, and dance are all great choices (and even better, these activities keep kids active and healthy). Not only will he have a ball, but things like adjusting his bat to the different positions of a pitched baseball, learning that standing too close on the dance floor means a run-in with someone, or discovering just how hard to kick the soccer ball to make a goal will help him gain valuable spatial=-awareness skills!
At-Home Activities
Brain Development
Major Milestones
From KinderCare Educators
New Baby
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Toddler
GEOMETRY & SPATIAL SENSE KINDERGARTEN ACTIVITIES
Looking for preschool and kindergarten activities emphasizing geometry and spatial sense?
Help children develop their understanding of objects and shapes in their environment and help them recognize and describe attributes of shapes.
The activities below are easy to integrate into daily routines.
Supplement your students understanding by reading books that talk about shapes and provide puzzles and posters with clearly illustrated shape pictures.
Integrate geometry into your learning zones. I have placed posters illustrating shapes and shape names in the dramatic play area and observed children tracing the shapes with their fingers, copying the shapes at the play table and asking each other what a certain shape was called.
What geometry and spatial skills should I teach?
Depending on where you live, learning outcomes regarding geometry and spatial sense kindergarten skills vary. Most students are working towards:
- sorting a given set of familiar 3-D objects using a single attribute, such as size or shape, and explaining their sorting rule
- stating the difference between two given pre-sorted sets by telling the sorting rule used to sort them
building and describing 3-D objects - creating a representation of a given 3-D object using materials, such as modeling clay and building blocks
comparing their representation to the original 3-D object - describing 3-D objects using words such as big, little, round, like a box, and like an ice cream cone
- CCSS – geometry
Why give children sorting activities?
Sorting and describing 3-D objects helps students learn how to group objects.
Students usually learn to first sort objects with one different attribute and then add more.
For example:
Show me all the red objects – one attribute
Show me the red triangles – two attributes
Show me the large, red, triangles – three attributes
Show me the thick, large, red triangles – four attributes
Visit more shape and space kindergarten activities at the following posts:
Attribute blocks
Sorting games
Classification games
Roll, slide, or both?
This kindergarten lesson helps students notice similarities in objects that slide and objects that roll and is a good opportunity for children to use math vocabulary.
Materials:
- Tub of geometric solids
- Ramp made of blocks and mat board
- Build the ramp with a long piece of mat board and blocks taped together (see a similar ramp here)
- Two hoops
- Word cards – Slide, roll, slide and roll
- Work with small groups of about ten students.
- Give each child a 3D shape.
- Have each child take a turn to see if their object slides or rolls down the ramp or does both.Let them try a few times.
- Put two hoops on the carpet that are intersected like a Venn diagram (see image).
- Students place objects that roll on one side, objects that slide on the other and objects that do both in the middle.
- Count how many objects in each category and record the number on a paper.
- Talk about why some did not roll or did not slide
- Record observations, record which side has fewer and which side has more.
Kindergarten activities with geoboards
Geoboards are an excellent hands-on manipulative tool to help children discover the concepts of shapes, angles, measurement, area, and perimeter. Give students plenty of time to play with the geoboards and elastic bands before trying to use them for a formal lesson.
1. Making shapes
Give each child a geoboard, a large elastic band and a picture of a square.
Have the students try to make a square with their elastic and geoboard. Demonstrate first.
Don’t assume that this is easy for all students, some need you to guide their hands to begin with. Do this activity with various shapes and teach vocabulary, such as triangle, square, rectangle, corners and sides as the children form the shapes.
2. Copying pictures
Give children dotted paper (same number of dots as geoboard) with shapes drawn on them. With this kindergarten activity the students try to reproduce the pictures.
More geometry & spatial sense kindergarten activities
- Copy 3D shapes by providing students with materials such as blocks or modeling clay and having them recreate an object, such as a tissue box.
- Cover designs with pattern blocks
- Play left & right games and activities – Hokey Pokey
2D geometric shapes – Recognize, name, draw, compare, and sort shapes
- Have sets of cut out laminated shapes in various colours and sizes.
- Use them in small groups. Ask students to choose a small blue square, then have another choose a large red square.
- Students take turns asking a partner to choose certain shapes so they will have practice using geometric vocabulary.
- Let students trace the shapes to make pictures.
Development of spatial representations in preschool children. | Article:
The development of spatial representations in preschool children
The development of spatial representations in preschool age is subject to the general laws of the ontogenesis of the human psyche, which is carried out by mastering, mastering the special experience accumulated by the previous generation. In modern literature, the importance of spatial perception and spatial orientation is widely noted, their closest relationship with human cognitive activity is emphasized (Ananiev 1964; Lublinskaya 1971, etc.)
The child’s ideas about space develop gradually. The fundamental stage in the structure of their formation is the child’s perception of his own body, which begins with a feeling of tension and relaxation of the muscles, as well as the interaction of the child’s body with the external space and with adults.
The newborn does not yet know where he himself ends and the world around him begins, does not realize that he has arms and legs. Until the baby begins to hold his head, sit down, get up, move, he receives information about the world and about himself through tactile sensations. The more diverse sensations the child receives at this stage, the sooner he will develop ideas about the boundaries of his own body and he will quickly understand that it is where he feels contact with a smooth or rough, hard or soft, cold or warm surface that the boundary occurs. his bodily “I” (Morgacheva 2009).
When determining the spatial relationships of surrounding objects, not only hand movements, but also eye and head movements are involved. The determination of the position of objects located around the child occurs similarly to the determination of the spatial relations of his own body, only now the child at first not only makes a movement with his right hand, but also looks at it, highlights it visually.
Further, shifting his gaze to one or another object, and often stretching out his hand towards it, he determines the position of the object in relation to his own body (Zaporozhets et al. 1964).
The child already in early childhood learns to isolate objects in space, to distinguish their shape, size, position and movement in a certain direction. The ability to visually distinguish spatial relationships is acquired by a small child in connection with the development of muscle sensations that arise during accommodation, convergence, eye movement while examining objects, tracking during their movement (Ananiev 1964).
The formation of a child’s visual-spatial representations (that is, ideas about the shape and size of objects and their location in space in relation to each other) takes quite a long time. An important role in this process is played not only by direct visual perception of objects, but also by the child’s independent actions with these objects (feeling them, shifting them from place to place, manipulating them), which allow him to get an idea of the shape and size of small objects surrounding him and learn to distinguish them from each other by various signs (Paramonova 2005).
Perceiving a geometric shape, a younger preschooler, as a rule, identifies it with an object (a square is often called a “window”, “a cube; a circle is called a ball”, “steering wheel”, “wheel”). Middle and older children show a need to understand the forms encountered. They try to establish what an object looks like and how it differs from its idea of different forms. The objectification characteristic of children of early and younger childhood is replaced by similitude (square – “like a pocket”, “like a gate”, oval – “like a cucumber”, “like a testicle”. An adult should support this child’s attempt to compare, understand the forms in time Therefore, it is not necessary to limit the child’s motor activity and his desire to approach objects, touch them, and try to act with them unnecessarily.0003
A child’s eye, which is so necessary for the perception of space, also develops in preschool years. Children solve complex visual tasks much worse than tasks for comparing the length of lines.
Children are able to solve them only starting from the age of six or seven. The reason for this is the low level of mastery of visual actions. However, the level of these actions in children of senior preschool and primary school age can be raised in the process of purposeful learning (Lavrent’eva 1968).
In the formation of ideas about the remoteness of objects, movements in the space of the child himself play an important role. It is not in vain that they say that we cognize space “by the measure of our own steps.” The child learns space as he masters it. While still lying in bed and acting with a pacifier, a rattle, the child learns a “close” space. “Far” he masters a little later, when he learns to move independently.
As soon as the child gets on his feet and walks, the space around him expands significantly, and the room turns into a new unknown world, which the baby is infinitely happy about. This period is extremely important for the normal and full development of the child.
Right now he is moving to the next stage in the development of spatial ideas – about the relationship between objects (Morgacheva 2009). The kid learns them only through practical activities. For example, when a child tries to reach a colorful box that mom has placed on the top shelf of the closet, he does not immediately realize that it is too high, or when he unsuccessfully tries to knock down a toy with a ball until he realizes that he needs to throw the ball further. In a word, at this stage of development, spatial representations are also formed in everyday life.
In play activity, children not only reproduce the relationships between adults that they observe, but also attach a play function to things included in the situation of play, and at the same time learn their objective properties and relationships. Therefore, the development of play activity contributes both to improvement in the recognition of spatial features of objects (especially shape, size, proportions, direction, etc.
), and the formation of higher levels of visual-motor coordination in spatial orientation.
The inclusion in the process of perception of the word plays a great role in the development of the perception of spatial relations. From the observations made by many psychologists (Ananiev 1964; Zaporozhets 1965; Lyublinskaya 1971; Usova 1965, etc.) it follows that in speech, with verbal differentiation, the right hand is distinguished by the child earlier than the left. This happens because when establishing a connection between the word “right” and the corresponding hand, the child relies on numerous visual-motor connections that he formed during the action of this hand. At a certain stage of development, in response to a request to show his right hand, the child says: “I eat with my right hand, draw, say hello – that means it’s my right hand” (Elkonin 1960:48). The role of the word in the development of spatial relations between objects is especially great. Even at preschool age, the child takes into account the spatial arrangement of objects in his actions.
However, the child begins to isolate the spatial relations between them, to abstract them in his perception only at preschool age, which occurs due to the mastery of verbal designations.
It should be noted that the correct reproduction of spatial relations takes place only if the child uses in the speech accompanying the action such words as ahead, near, in the middle, between. In those cases where the child is limited to general, undifferentiated verbal designations of space that do not reflect relations (such as here, there, here), he cannot correctly perform the task offered to him. Therefore, the inclusion in the child’s dictionary of such words as on, under, over, in front, behind, to the right, to the left, etc., denoting the spatial relations of objects, helps to isolate, abstract spatial relations in the perceived situation and form spatial representations (Zaporozhets and others . 1964).
Age indicators of the development of spatial representations
in normally developing children
|
Age of a child |
Achievements in spatial -orienting activities |
|
from birth to 1 year 9 |
– the most elementary 9000 – arise arise forms of orientation in space. – by the end of the first year of life, he can act in a close space, reflect the distance to the object, determine its location (Sechenov I.M., Mastyukova E.M., etc.). |
|
From 1 year to 3 years |
– having learned to walk, the child quickly masters the “path space”, but movement does not yet give him the opportunity to separate the distance and location of the object from the object itself; – the child’s ability to navigate in space according to the pattern and the word appears; – by the end of the second year of life, children correlate a geometric figure (circle, triangle, square) with their place, but find it difficult to add them. |
|
3-4 years |
– specific ideas about the directions “forward-backward”, “up-down”. These representations are connected with the movements of the child himself in this direction. – sequence in the assimilation of “spatial terminology”. The prepositions “about”, “near”, “at”, “in”, “on”, “under” appear in speech. |
|
4 – 5 years |
– already distinguish at least two spatial features: the direction and place of the path change (turns), sometimes the distance; – they distinguish between their left and right hands in practical actions, but their name is still not firmly known; – can not only practically reproduce, but also determine in words the location of objects relative to themselves (M.V. Vovchik-Blakitnaya, A.Ya. Kolodnaya). – by the age of 5, the child is already capable of arbitrarily depicting an object, can, on assignment, reproduce round shapes, draw straight horizontal and vertical lines, but for quite a long time, preschool children have a better command of vertical lines, rather than horizontal ones. – the words “right”, “left”, the use of which has long been limited to the situation of distinguishing one’s hands. Only occasionally do the prepositions “between”, “above”, “opposite” appear. |
|
5 – 7 years |
– the description of the path acquires a generalized character due to special words that accurately designate the space (“near”, “right”, “left”, “opposite”, etc.), however, behind these words there is still no true concept of space. Only children who own a more differentiated active vocabulary are able to restore an integral “map of space” and a “review map”; – can already navigate in directions and from the position of another person. Awareness of the directions “right-left” is more difficult than distinguishing the directions “forward-backward”, “up-down”; – more flexible use of the elements of the grammatical structure of speech in the process of spatial orientation; – the level of development of spatial representations that has developed in children by the age of seven does not yet allow them to correctly navigate in each new situation. |
|
School age |
– there is an accumulation of spatial representations and the formation of a connection between them, connections between spatial and quantitative representations begin to form, work continues on the differentiation of spatial features and relationships. The connections between the image and the word come into full compliance (B.G. Ananiev, O.I. Galkina, etc.). |
The genesis of these forms is closely connected with the development of complex optical-vestibular-kinesthetic connections. A child can perceive an object in a certain place in space only under the condition of repeated convergence of the axes of the eyes on the object. 
After the show, they successfully cope. 
Differentiation of spatial signals for children is difficult. The difficulty of differentiating spatial features and relationships can explain the presence of errors in writing and mathematics (when writing graphically similar letters and numbers, etc.). Thus, in the process of developing spatial representations in normally developing children, there is a gradual transition from spatial perception, which is characterized by the fact that the child can act in a visually observable space, to actions based on representations.
Further formation of spatial representations occurs in close connection with the development of motor skills, elementary objective actions and speech, provided that the child himself is active and the activity is properly organized. Gradually, as thinking and speech develop, spatial concepts develop on the basis of ideas.
Orientation in space is of universal importance for all aspects of human activity, covering various aspects of its interaction with reality. Therefore, the harmonious development of the child is impossible without the development of his ability to orient himself in space.
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We offer teachers assistance in certification. 
If a child is not prepared for schoolwork, he or she experiences discomfort in the classroom. Therefore, in the educational work of the school and preschool institution, there must be continuity. 
e. the ability of the student to self-development and self-improvement by acquiring new social experience. In another, narrower sense, it is the ability to independently acquire new knowledge and skills, including the organization of this process. 
All the functions that provide visual-spatial discrimination of objects are intensively formed precisely at preschool age. The importance of spatial perception and spatial orientation is widely noted in the scientific literature, and their closest relationship with human cognitive activity is emphasized. 
Distinguishing right and left hands 
The formation of children’s skills to determine the position of one or another object in relation to another in a word. 
That is why classes on the development of spatial representations are best organized in a playful way. 
These are such games and tasks as “Graphic dictations”, “Determine according to the plan”, “Sea battle”, “I’m going along the route”, etc. 
