Matchstick Shapes

This is a simple activity that supports children in their understanding of shapes. It can be either used to learn about 2D shapes or if you add some play dough or blue tack you can get really complicated and create 3D shapes too!

Set Up

For this I used the wooden matchsticks and blue tissue paper from our Seaside Activity Box. I arranged the matchsticks into a shapes as a starting point. Trapeziums happen to randomly be a favourite in our house!

M had already started to create shapes with the matchsticks when we did the natural collage activity. So as soon as she saw this activity she knew what to do. First we talked about Mummy’s trapezium and what made it a trapezium. A great way of learning something is explaining it to someone else.

Using the matchsticks was fiddly and required patience to get them just right. Trying to create a rectangle was actually one of the trickier ones as M had to work out how to create the longer side so that it didn’t end up becoming a square. All the conversations we had whilst playing with this involved lots of learning.