2D and 3D Shapes Worksheets
13 printable pages. Six flat shapes with their sides and corners, six solids with faces, edges and corners — drawn the way a textbook draws them, hidden edges dashed.
- Pages
- 13
- Ages
- 5-8
- Paper size
- A4
- Black ink only
Free to print at home, at school, and in a classroom of thirty.
Six flat shapes with sides and corners, six solids with faces, edges and corners
A square is flat. A cube is not. Children meet both words in the same term and swap them for years afterwards, mostly because the flat shapes are drawn properly and the solids are drawn as cartoons.
The six flat shapes
Circle, triangle, square, rectangle, pentagon and hexagon. Each gets a page with the shape drawn large, boxes to count its sides and corners, and a space to draw it freehand.
The circle page is worth stopping on: zero sides and zero corners, which children find either obvious or outrageous, and either way it is the page that shows what “sides” and “corners” actually mean.
The six solids
Cube, cuboid, sphere, cylinder, cone and pyramid. Each is drawn in the standard way, with the edges you could not see if you were holding it shown as dashed lines. That convention is not decoration — it is how every textbook and exam paper from here on will draw a solid, and a child who has never seen it reads a dashed line as a mistake.
Boxes on each page count faces, edges and corners.
The words, and which one is which
| Word | Means | On a cube |
|---|---|---|
| Face | a flat surface | 6 |
| Edge | where two faces meet | 12 |
| Corner | where edges meet — also called a vertex | 8 |
A cube has six faces and each face is a square. That sentence is the whole relationship between 2D and 3D, and it is the sentence to keep repeating.
Find them in the room
Every 3D page ends with a box and an instruction to find that solid somewhere nearby and draw it. A tin is a cylinder, a cereal box is a cuboid, a dice is a cube. This takes two minutes and does more than the counting boxes above it, because a solid you have held is a solid you can picture.
What comes next
Shape Tracing for a younger child who needs to draw the flat shapes before naming their parts, and Draw the Other Half for the next piece of geometry.
Printing this one correctly
In your printer dialog set Scale to 100% or Actual size, not Fit to page. Fit to page shrinks the tracing letters and they stop matching the size a child's hand is learning.
Plain paper is fine for crayons and pencils. If your child uses felt pens, 100 gsm paper stops the ink bleeding to the next sheet.
