How to Help Your Child Love Geometry: Tips for Parents

Geometry is often seen as a dry subject, yet it is the most hands-on part of math: you can touch it, fold it from paper and spot it in your own room. Here is what parents can do, and which activities suit children of different ages.

Build a Positive Attitude

Avoid saying “I never understood it either,” because children pick up that mindset easily. Show interest in what your child is doing, and praise the reasoning, not just the right answer.

Use Practical Examples

Measure a room together and draw a floor plan, work out how many tiles the bathroom floor needs, and look for lines of symmetry in a window, a door or a butterfly.

Learn Through Play

The tangram is an old Chinese puzzle of seven flat pieces arranged to match a silhouette. Building sets, jigsaws and origami also develop spatial thinking.

Activities by Age

• Ages 6–9: find ten things at home shaped like a circle, a square or a triangle; build a cat or a house from a tangram; fold a sheet in half and cut out a symmetrical shape.
• Ages 10–12: calculate the area of their room; draw the net of a cube, cut it out and glue it together; try to find other nets that also fold into a cube.
• Ages 13 and up: cut out a paper triangle, tear off its three corners and line them up side by side to form a straight angle, 180°, a hands-on way to see that a triangle’s angles add up to 180°. Then prove it properly in class.

Support and Encouragement

Celebrate effort, not only grades. If something is hard, take a step back: the gap is often in an earlier topic rather than the new one. The story of how geometry was taught for over two thousand years is in Euclid’s Elements: Geometry Taught for 2,000 Years.

How to Get Started

In our geometry course, students come to understand the properties of figures and theorems, learn to solve problems on their own and justify the solution, and prepare for tests, exams and olympiads. Lessons are open to students from age 13. A trial lesson costs $8: it is individual and lasts 45 minutes. More about the course is on the Geometry page.