Elementary Kindergarten Preschool
MathHolidaysPrintables
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Get your students excited about working on shapes, matching, and their visual discrimination skills while also celebrating the Christmas season with these Santa shape shadow matching cards!
They make the perfect addition to your math center during those last few weeks of school before you head out for the holiday break and your students are going to absolutely love them!
Christmas Shape Shadow Matching
Christmas is one of those holidays that doesn’t really need any more hype.
Children of all ages know when it’s coming and the excitement starts building long before the actual holiday arrives.
But that doesn’t mean that we can’t find ways to add to the fun and this Santa themed shadow matching activity is the perfect way to do that while still working on a number of important skills!
One of those skills being visual discrimination.
Visual discrimination is the ability to identify differences in objects and shapes.
This skill is critical for children that are learning to read and write as it is those differences that will allow them to identify letters and numbers.
Shadow matching is an excellent way to practice this skill because to match the correct shadows, children have to pay special attention to the shapes of those shadows since they lack the other details necessary to make matching easier.
These Santa shape shadow matching cards are a prime example of that.
One the colored cards, your students will be able to see the shape of Santa. They’ll be able to look at the details and identify each of the 2D shapes.
The shadow cards, however, have none of that.
They’ll have to look at the outline of the shape and compare it to that of the colored card.
This gives them the chance to really focus on the similarities and differences that they see between the two.
Matching Christmas Shapes
In addition to those visual discrimination skills, your students will also have the opportunity to work on 2D shapes and matching with this activity.
The shapes included in this activity are:
- circle
- crescent
- rhombus
- heart
- heptagon
- hexagon
- octagon
- oval
- parallelogram
- pentagon
- rectangle
- square
- star
- trapezoid
- triangle
Give your students the colored Santa cards, or set them up in your math center, and have them work on identifying each of the shapes as they match up the various Santa shapes to their shadows.
