2D Shapes Teaching Resources

Bring dimension to 2D shapes for elementary students with printable worksheets, digital activities, math games, and more — created by teachers for teachers! This comprehensive collection of teaching resources includes editable curriculum-aligned lessons on two-dimensional shapes, all ready to be printed and used in the classroom! Explore the entire collection to find educational games, activities, worksheets, posters, and vocabulary word wall cards to assist your students when they are learning to identify 2-D figures by their name and their attributes.

What Are 2D Shapes?

Teaching this part of the math curriculum for the first time in a while? Here's a quick refresher from the teachers on the Teach Starter team! Two-dimensional shapes, or 2D shapes, are shapes that have only length and width, but no depth. Some common examples of 2D shapes that we teach in elementary school include:

Square
Rectangle
Triangle
Circle
Ellipse
Parallelogram
Rhombus

Each of these shapes has its own unique characteristics and properties, such as the number of sides, the types of angles, and the relationship between the sides and angles. For example, a square has four equal sides and four right angles, while a circle has no sides and no angles. Teaching about 2D shapes is crucial in those early primary grades as these are the building blocks of more complex geometric concepts. Understanding them is an important foundation for learning math and spatial reasoning. 2D Shapes in Kindergarten Teaching kindergarten this year? You'll find circles, squares, and more are part of your curriculum. Introduce your class to these basic 2D shapes and help them learn to identify them by their characteristics and properties, such as the number of sides, corners, or curves. At this stage, students should learn the names of these shapes and be able to draw or trace them. They also might be taught to sort and classify shapes based on their attributes.

2D Shapes Throughout Elementary School

As students leave the primary grades and develop their math skills, they will learn about the relationships between different 2D shapes, such as:

How a rectangle is made up of two congruent squares
How a square can be divided into two congruent rectangles
How to measure different features of shapes

By the time they reach middle school and high school, students will have a solid foundation in 2D geometry and be ready to learn more advanced concepts, such as symmetry and tessellations, or to start learning 3D shapes and spaces.