Spatial reasoning activities for kids help them in understanding shapes and making their mental notes. Like a simple drawing of a house can be described as an arrangement of two rectangles, a parallelogram and a triangle.
Spatial reasoning is the ability to manipulate shapes and orientate them mentally. It is the ability to understand how different shapes fit together to make recognisable objects.
Tangram is the famous game and one of the most popular spatial reasoning activities for kids. It involves geometry, problem solving, visualisation and pattern predictions.
Spatial reasoning for kids crucial as it affect your child’s early math skills and are an important predictor of achievement in STEM fields.
Visual-spatial skills are of great importance for success in solving many tasks in every day life. Like following directions on map, driving a car or interacting with our environment. It is the key in building a child’s sense of size, space, shape, position, direction, and movement.
For young children, research indicates a direct relationship between spatial reasoning for kids and arithmetic abilities at primary level. There is also evidence suggesting that these skills influence early reading abilities of children.
However, even with the increasing evidence in support of Spatial skills for kids, they are rarely included in kindergarten or primary curriculum. That puts children at a severe learning disadvantage.
But, the good news is spatial skills for kids need not be limited to school learning. As a parent, you can do numerous spatial reasoning activities for kids to cultivate and enhance these skills at home and without spending too much on toys. From letting them play freely with blocks to moulding clay, every household has ample material to develop spatial skills.
16 Spatial Reasoning Activities for Kids
1. Block towers
This is one of early spatial reasoning activities for kids. Let your child stack all the blocks into a tall tower and crash it all over the place. Before you snap at her for not making a structure, stop!
When young children stack blocks and later crash them, though how mindless it may appear, they are working on their sense of geometry, balance, size, shape and position. View this crashing is a precursor to advanced building skills.
2. Draw and Paint
Every child draws and paints. Be it random lines or a well-drawn picture, it helps children explore the concept of space and geometry. Encourage your children to paint a picture by looking at their surroundings or from their favourite book.
3. Play dough
Inspire your children to make objects they see in their surrounding using play dough. Manipulating dough into a real life object or an animal indicates a well developed spatial understanding and reasoning skills. Encourage them to create different objects, shapes and patterns using their own imagination.
4. Take them outdoors
Spatial skills require lots of visualization. Unleash their imagination by taking them for a walk in a nearby park, to the supermarket or a zoo. The more they observe, better they will get.
5. Board Games and Puzzles
Board games teach planning, following instructions and other spatial skills. Similarly, puzzles aid visualization of how and where to fit the piece.
Do not limit your child to jigsaw puzzles. Tangrams are equally fun. Let your child explore it and manipulate the pieces the way she wants. It is not necessary that your child makes pictures according to the challenge cards. Free play is good too!
6. Origami
This ancient Japanese art of paper folding heavily relies on spatial skills. So cut some square sheets out of old newspapers and engage in some origami fun. Start with easy origami like paper planes, boats and gradually progress to tougher challenges.
Origami requires lots of patience and practice. It is a good idea to do it together so your child can see and follow you. Once they are confident enough, they can play with origami independently.
7. Explore Maps
Introduce maps to your child in a fun way. Help them figure out the street they live on. If you can’t get them to sit on a map books, let them try their hands on Google Maps.
Children are often attracted by technology and fascinated to they see themselves moving on the app. When you are returning home from an outing, ask your child for directions to home.
8. Use the Jargon
Exposing children to the correct jargon can greatly aid the process. Introduce directions, left-right, up-down, inside-outside and spatial words early on. This would help your child in visualising as well as describing their mental imagery.
9. Matching Structures
This is a fun game where you create a structure using simple blocks or legos and your child has to re-create the matching structure.
Start with a simple house or a building. Show it to your child for a minute or less and ask her to make its replica. Such activities train children to observe objects and create their mental pictures, thus enhancing their spatial reasoning abilities.
10.Photography
One of the much loved spatial reasoning activities for kids, photography helps children analyse pictures from different angles and depths.
Encourage your children to take different pictures of the same object and compare how it looks from top, front and back. These are similar skills architects use in engineering drawing.
11. Explore Shapes
Shapes are the foundation blocks of spatial reasoning. Invest good time in building sense of shapes and shape attributes in your children.
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Enquire how different shapes are used and how their shape attributes influence their use. Tough seemingly simple, a good unit on shapes can deliver immense benefits to your child’s spatial reasoning, logical and mathematical skills.
12. Story Building Games
This is one of the spatial reasoning activities for kids that integrates literacy, comprehension with spatial reasoning. Read a book together and then ask your child to draw a structure/building/scene from the book.
Highly engaging, this is one of best quiet time spatial reasoning activities for kids.
13. Animal Yoga
For children who love to love, this is a must try. Ask your child to observe an animal card and make a yoga pose out of it. You can even play animal yoga videos.
This is one of few spatial reasoning activities for kids that dwells of body modulation and visualisation of one’s own body. Seemingly simple but not as easy.
14. Explore Tessellations
Tessellations are geometrical wonders. To make a tessellation, you must master the art of manipulating objects in space.
Learning about tessellation positively influences your child’s spatial reasoning, geometry, logical and mathematical skills. We don’t see any reason to miss them.
15. Loose part structures
Loose parts structures present a great opportunity to explore spatial reasoning skills. Let your child’s imagination run wild with loose parts like pebbles, pencils, wooden sticks.
Invite your child to create something unique and out of their imagination using loose parts. This would require a great deal of spatial awareness along with the knowledge of science to combine and balance objects. A great spatial awareness boosting STEM activity, this is a must try.
16. Experiment with Jenga
Give Jenga blocks a twist and use them as building bricks for making structures. Take inspiration from famous structures or from those in your neighbourhood to make architectural structures. With younger children make shapes using Jenga blocks.
Lastly remember, Spatial Reasoning is not an inborn skill or gender dependent. It has to be cultivated and nurtured through practice. That said, it is never too late or too early to start with child.
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