Kindergarten to Grade 3 Geometry and Spatial Sense

Location and MovementOverviewThrough everyday activities, preschool children learn to describe their positionsrelative to objects or other people. Such terms as on, below, beside, under, andnext to allow them to express these spatial relationships. Children also developlanguage that expresses how a person or object moves to another location(e.g., towards, away from, back and forth, backwards).In the primary grades, teachers encourage students to continue to use spatiallanguage to describe their own location and movement, as well as the locationsand movements of other persons or objects. Teachers also show students how torepresent locations and movements on rectangular grids. Students’ understandingof movement is further developed as they learn about transformations: translations(slides), rotations (turns), and reflections (flips).The following are key points that can be made about location and movement inthe primary years:• The location of an object can be described in terms of its spatial relationshipto another object or in terms of its position on a grid.• Transformational geometry involves translations (slides), reflections (flips),and rotations (turns).• Symmetry can be used to analyse and create shapes in which one half is areflection of the other.LocationFrom an early age, children perceive the spatial relationships among themselves,other people, and objects, and develop language to describe these spatial relationships.Generally, students in Kindergarten and Grade 1 observe the spatialrelationships of objects in their environment well enough to create simpleconcrete maps of familiar places (Clements, 1999). For example, students mightcreate a concrete map of their classroom by using blocks to represent furnitureand placing the blocks in positions that match the arrangement of furniture in43