While most of my autistic daughter’s academic needs are met through her IEP goals at school, we also do some work at home. This is either through our own ESY (Extended School Year) at home or during her afterschool at home. I structure my plans around her IEP goals and what she wants to work on.
We mainly focus on her fine motor skills, literacy, and self-help skills.
But, on occasion, we’ll also bring more fun stuff in. This simple shape recognition worksheet was designed with my autistic daughter in mind. Though, you could also use this with a toddler or younger preschooler alongside some of my preschool printables.
How to connect this worksheet to real life
For my autistic daughter, anything that we are teaching in our ESY or afterschool program, needs to have some sort of real-life connection. When it comes to shapes, this is easier because we can do things like take a shape walk or go on a shape scavenger hunt.
For her, she also loves old episodes of Barney so we draw on YouTube for that. And this particular song also touches on the three shapes that we’re covering in this worksheet set. Songs, for her, also help to reinforce concepts because of the repetition.
She can also use the worksheets to work on her fine motor skills with tracing or use them as modified Play Doh mats.
Another way to use them is with various shape sorters or toys that we’ve kept around. We won’t use all parts of the toys, just the shapes themselves so we can sort.
This also helps with her sorting skills and if we’re feeling extra ambitious, we work on sizes.
How to use this worksheet for a shape scavenger hunt
To take it further, we can also look around us or in magazines to find shapes. If we’re using magazines, she either points to the pictures or I’ll cut them out for her and then we sort them to the appropriate page.
If we’re going on a shape walk, we take our worksheets with us and put them on a clipboard. From there, we’ll either write down the shapes that we saw or draw a picture of it. Sometimes we’ll do both but that also depends on her patience levels.
What you get in this free printable shapes worksheet
This is a simple set of worksheets and there aren’t many pages but you get the following:
- Coloring pages (or playdough mats) for a circle, triangle, and square
- Shape mazes (circle, triangle, and square)
- Do-a-Dot (circle, triangle, and square)
- Tracing/Writing practice to identify the shape (a circle is round, a square has four sides, a triangle has three sides)
- And the page you see above
This worksheet is part of a new series of printable worksheets for autistic children. You can use them at home or school, but thy will all cover basic concepts. I use these with my autistic daughter as well and hope to have a big series by the time all is said and done. We’ll cover:
- Alphabet
- Numbers
- Colors
- Prewriting
Really anything and everything that needs to be met.
If you have any suggestions for a theme, please do not hesitate to ask.
(NO OPT-IN REQUIRED)
Kori
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