(But some cylinders will slide more easily than others!) A cylinder, on the other hand, has two circular faces, so it can both roll and slide. For example, a child might see that although both a cylinder and a sphere can roll, a sphere has no faces and cannot slide. This will enrich the ways in which they can describe and compare solids.
Tracing around the face of solids will help a child understand a cube differs from a rectangular prism because all six of its faces are squares. Because of this, it is common to teach solid shapes first before moving on to plane shapes, which we practice in HMH Into Math. This is an important idea, as the real world around us is three dimensions and made of solid shapes! The place where people see flat plane shapes is generally on the faces of 3-D objects. They will also come to see how the plane shapes comprise the faces of solid shapes. (Grade K)Īs with plane shapes, children will learn to describe solid shapes in terms of their attributes.