This varied Space and 3D Shape Year 3 series of lessons encompasses various areas of shape and space, including how to describe position, direction and movement, co-ordinates, identifying the properties of 3D shapes and much more through a variety of hands-on, practical and written activities.

With lesson plans, slides, activity ideas, differentiated worksheets and much more, these downloadable Year 3 'Space and 3D Shape' lessons are sure to improve all aspects of their spacial awareness!

Moving Language

The first lesson in this series starts by recapping some of the language associated with position, direction and movement, such as clockwise, anti-clockwise, grid, row, column, horizontal and vertical, before learning how to identify the position of objects within a grid using coordinates. During the main activity, children can put this to the test as they play 'Battleships'. There is also the opportunity to use roamers (or even 'human roamers'!) to practise using directional language.

This downloadable Position and Direction Year 3 lesson contains a lesson plan, slideshow presentation and printable teaching resources.

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Compass Points

This fun Compass Points KS2 Year 3 3D Shape and Space lesson reminds your class about the four directions on a compass and extends their understanding of how to describe movement around a grid using the directions North, South, East and West. Your children are challenged to help a hungry mouse find all the cheese in a grid, or turn themselves into human robots...will the children in the role of controllers direct their human robots safely around the classroom?

This downloadable lesson contains a lesson plan, slideshow presentation and printable teaching resources.

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Identifying 3D Shapes

This series of lessons now moves on to look at identifying 3D shapes, beginning by exploring the difference between 2D and 3D shapes. The informative slides teach your class the difference between a face, edge and vertex before challenging them to describe the features of some familiar 3D shapes. There are also some challenging riddles to solve!

This downloadable lesson comes with a lesson plan, slideshow presentation and printable teaching resources.

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Describing 3D Shapes

This Describing 3D Shapes lesson encourages your class to describe 3D shapes in detail. They will be challenged to recognise how many faces, edges and vertices various 3D shapes have. The lesson also looks at examples of objects that are the same shape as the shapes they have been describing, such as balls (spheres), sugar lumps (cubes), candles (cylinders) cases (cuboids) and many other examples.

This downloadable lesson contains a lesson plan, slideshow presentation and printable teaching resources. Click through the images to see some of the resources in more detail.

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Making 3D Shapes

The final lesson in this series explores making 3D shapes, mainly using nets. It shows your class how to identify which shapes the nets will create by looking at their features, before giving the chance to practise putting 3D nets together to make shapes from the simple (cubes) to the tricky (octahedron)! Alternatively, they can use their knowledge of 3D shapes to make a range of shapes from dried spaghetti and plasticine.

This downloadable lesson contains a lesson plan, slideshow presentation and printable teaching resources.

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