Recognition of shapes

10 Hands-On Shapes Recognition Activities for Preschoolers

Teaching children about shapes should be a fun, hands-on experience. It is by experiencing concepts through the body and the senses that real learning happens in the early years.

Scroll down to the section ‘10 simple shapes recognition activities’ for some great ideas.

Why is it Important to Learn About Shapes?

An important part of child development, shape recognition is about more than just being able to spot the basic shapes. It’s important for building early maths, reading and other areas too.

Shapes are found all around us and take many different forms, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional.

Children learn that shapes have properties – such as lines, curves, sizes, lengths and positions in space, and that all physical objects have shape.

They develop their visual perception (when the brain interprets what the eyes see) as they are exposed to shapes around them.

Shapes are a part of mathematical concepts (like geometry) and are also used in many scientific and technical fields.

The recognition of shapes is crucial for learning to read and building early literacy skills.

Letters are made up of shapes and children need to learn to distinguish, recognize and remember the specific shapes in order to read fluently. Shapes are the first ‘symbols’ children learn to interpret. [source]

How Do You Teach Shape Recognition?

The best way for children to learn about shapes is through play. They need many opportunities to touch and see three-dimensional shapes in their daily lives.

These concepts can also be taught through shape recognition games and activities that are planned specifically to introduce the concept of shape.

Activities like tracing and worksheets are best kept for much older children as these are unlikely to hold a child’s attention for long, and they are not really meaningful to a young child.

It is more important to focus on doing hands-on activities during preschool so that a child fully understands the properties of shapes by experiencing them with their body and all their senses.

It is also important for parents and teachers to actively teach the vocabulary about shapes. They need to hear concepts such as:

Straight lines or curvy lines
Sides
Surfaces
Size – bigger, smaller, longer, etc.
Round, pointy
2-dimensional, 3-dimensional
The names of shapes – oval, rectangle, triangular prism

This can be done in natural ways during a conversation:

Is your dinner plate round?
What else is round in our house?
This picture of a tent looks like a triangle – it’s pointy at the top.

When teaching the shapes, remember children learn these in a concrete-pictorial-abstract way, as they do many other concepts.

They learn the shape of a physical object, then later learn to associate a picture of a shape with the physical object. After that, they can recognize an abstract representation of a shape.

An example of this is playing with a beach ball and learning that it is round; then understanding that a picture of a ball represents a round, circular shape; then identifying a simple circle drawn on paper.

10 Simple Shapes Recognition Activities and Games

Here are some simple shape activities to try at home or school.

1. Shape Sorting

Sorting is an important mental concept and it’s easy to do with shapes.

Provide a container of shapes – cutouts, wooden or plastic shapes – and get kids to sort them according to different criteria.

Here are some examples:

Shapes with straight edges vs shapes with curved edges
Shapes with 3 sides and shapes with 4 sides

Shapes with corners and shapes without corners
2D vs 3D shapes

Here are more fun sorting activities for preschoolers.

2. Body Shapes

Play a movement game with shapes. Say the name of a shape and ask children to make the shape with their bodies.

Get them to straighten up into a tall rectangle, puff their arms out to the side to make themselves round, stand with legs far apart and arms pointed above you to make a triangle, etc.

Before you show or help with ideas, see if the kids can figure out on their own how to make these shapes. They may think outside the box and find new ways to make the shapes.

This is a great activity for body awareness.

3. Block and Ball Play

Children need regular exposure to shapes by playing with blocks, balls and other toys during their free play time.

This is an activity that doesn’t need much regulation by an adult but is as important as planned shapes activities.

4. Playdough Shapes

Give kids playdough and shape cutters and let them explore different shapes this way.

Make a batch of easy homemade playdough and this will keep kids occupied for hours.

If you don’t have cutters in the form of shapes, then improvise with tins (round), plastic containers (square and rectangle), etc.

5. Yummy Shapes

For a tastier version of the above activity – that will leave a bigger imprint on kids’ memory – make shapes out of cookie dough and then eat them after!

6. Find the Shapes

Show children an example of a simple shape, such as a circle, and challenge them to find as many items as they can around them that have the same shape. (Here are more games about circles to try).

They could also draw pictures of all the things they can think of that have a circle shape.

This teaches kids that shapes are part of their world.

7. Build With Shapes

If you have plastic or wooden shapes that are relatively flat, let your child ‘build’ pictures out of them using the shapes.

They could construct a house or a person, for example, by learning to use the shapes to substitute the various parts they need.

These shapes can also be made out of cardboard.

8. Feel the Shape

Use the same shapes from the activity above to do a sensory activity.

Blindfold a child, then give him a shape or ask him to pick a shape out of a bag. He must describe the shape (it is round and has no straight edges), then say what the shape is.

If he guesses right, he can keep the shape. If not, it goes back into the bag. This can be turned into a game to see how many shapes each person can accumulate.

9. Shape Stamping

Provide poster paints on trays and get kids to stamp shapes onto them.

Use blocks for these shapes or make potato prints, sponge shapes, etc. Use your imagination.

10. Shape Pictures

A fun art activity, this can be attempted after children have had ample opportunity to make shape pictures out of real shapes.

Provide lots of pre-cut paper shapes in various colours, white paper and glue.

Get kids to make their own shape pictures. Let them use their creativity and do not try to guide their creations.

Definitely don’t give them a model to copy! This should be a form of process art, where the learning is in the doing, not the final product.

If you are looking for more creative art ideas, try these shape crafts for preschoolers.

Sources:

Natanson, J. 1998. Learning Through Play: A parent’s guide to the first five years. Tafelberg Publishers Limited: Cape Town.

Pieterse, M. 2007. Language and School Readiness. Metz Press: Welgemoed.

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How to Teach Shape Recognition to Preschoolers with Fun Activities

You are here: Home / Math / How to Teach Shape Recognition to Preschoolers with Fun Activities

September 13, 2017 by Sheryl Cooper

Inside: How to Teach Shape Recognition to Preschoolers with Fun Activities with Free Printable

One of the areas we have to cover in our preschool assessments is shapes. I am always looking for ways to build shape recognition skills, but I want them to be playful and authentically blend in with our other hands-on activities.

I decided to put together my own collection of shape recognition activities by doing a little searching.

After weeding out the results, I came up with over 16 ideas that I knew would be perfect. Not only are they fun, but they involve building other skills, too. I always love that!

So put away those flashcards, my friends. These fun activities will help your preschoolers learn to identify circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, and ovals.

👉 Bonus! I created a shape matching activity printable for your children. Scroll towards the bottom of this post to get the download.

I’ve also put together a collection of activities for math and literacy that are also hands-on and appropriate for this age group:

Preschool Math Activities
Preschool Literacy Activities

How to Teach Shape Recognition to Preschoolers with Fun Activities

Build shape recognition using toys.

Mix colors while stamping circles from paper tubes.

Take apart your nesting toys to stamp shapes with paint.

Make a simple shape collage. (Homegrown Friends)

Go on a shape hunt at the playground (free printable included). (Buggy and Buddy)

Paint with different shapes of foam blocks. (Meri Cherry)

Make a shape puzzle using blocks you already have. (Twodaloo) (ETA: Unfortunately website is no longer running.)

Trace shapes on a chalkboard. (Hands On As We Grow)

Create a fine motor shape bin. (Stir the Wonder)

Make a shape sorting activity from an ice cube tray. (Mess for Less)

Make paper roads in different shapes and trace with cars. (Adventures of Adam)

Play shape hopscotch indoors! (Housing a Forest)

Use colored construction paper to create a train color sorting activity. (Mom Inspired Life)

More shapes activities:

Toddler Triangle Shapes Activity

15 Activities for Teaching Squares

Shapes Art Using Toys

Teaching Circles to Toddlers and Preschoolers

Going on a Circle Hunt Circle Time Activity

Here’s a simple shape matching activity for your children to try today! Click on the photo for the link to the PDF download:

FREE CIRCLE TIME PLANNER!

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Filed Under: Math, preschool, Toddler Math Tagged With: preschool, printable, shapes

About Sheryl Cooper

Sheryl Cooper is the founder of Teaching 2 and 3 Year Olds, a website full of activities for toddlers and preschoolers. She has been teaching this age group for over 20 years and loves to share her passion with teachers, parents, grandparents, and anyone with young children in their lives.

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Recognition of documents for the purposes of remote banking / Sudo Null IT News

The emergence of remote banking services (RBS) has changed the entire banking business, providing the opportunity to receive financial services "in no time". Today we want to tell you about our new Smart Document Engine product, which will change the RBS process, providing the procedure for opening accounts and obtaining loans in "two clicks".

Remote banking service (RBS) is a convenient financial management tool, the level of development of which in our country can hardly be underestimated. The popularity of digital banking services is great both among ordinary people (individuals) and among companies. Faithful satellites of RBS are document recognition systems. They play an important role in the RBS process, having already solved the problem of instant and secure onboarding for individuals and implemented several convenient cases (for example, by automating card-to-card transfers or paying receipts using QR codes).

Today, advanced digital banks are actively using passport recognition and face verification technologies to open accounts for individuals. With opening an account for legal entities, everything is more difficult. The required set of documents is wider. Usually, to open an account, banks require the provision of a charter, certificates of registration of the company with various state bodies, statistics, an order to appoint a sole executive body, a card with a seal and signature, and other documents.

Imagine how much easier the process of opening an account would be if there was a remote banking function for automatically checking and recognizing images of specified documents with reserving an account for a new client. Of course, it is absolutely necessary to bring the originals of all documents to the bank or transfer them to the field employee later (these are the requirements of the law). But this can be done already in working order, and not in a “fever”, when the details are needed “here and now”.

Something like this (only more emotionally) we reasoned, plunging into the endless process of opening a current account in one of the largest banks in our country. Sadly, no automation was shown to us. The reason turned out to be simple: the document recognition solutions used are recognized only “in theory”, but in practice they “stumble” on technological barriers from the last century:

300 DPI scans are expected as input images, photos from small format cameras do not provide the required image quality;
require high performance servers for deployment;
In fact, only OCR is provided out of the box, and all additional document mining needs to be implemented on your side.

Therefore, we decided to create a recognition system that does not have these limitations. We tried to rethink the problem of document recognition anew and fixed the following requirements for the new product:

Support for scans and photos. This is one of the key requirements. We have repeatedly written that the method of digitizing paper documents from scanning is moving towards photography. It is faster, more convenient, but it has its own characteristics: a full range of problems arises associated with projective geometric distortions of the generated document image, lighting variability, and the presence of foreign elements on the photographed scene.
On-premises only. Data must NOT be transmitted to any services, must NOT be stored, and the system must NOT require internet access to operate. All document processing must be carried out strictly locally on the client's device or within the bank's infrastructure.
Works both on servers and on mobile devices. The operating time on mobile devices must be acceptable, while the optimization of the recognition time must be without sacrificing quality.
Rigid and flexible shapes support. The new product must support all kinds of documents. Including multipage. In addition, we need the functionality of adaptation to arbitrary new types of documents.
Recognition of various elements. A document is more than just letters. Accordingly, recognition is not just OCR. It is necessary to additionally localize and recognize other mandatory elements of business documents: tables, labels and checkboxes, signatures and stamps, handwritten notes, etc.
Document completion analysis. The built-in mechanism of the new product should provide control over the filling of the document, the presence of keywords and phrases, control over the absence of blots, corrections and other notes.
Document authentication elements. Additional color control of both individual elements and the entire document as a whole, font style analysis, logo visualization allow the product to detect individual cases of fraud at an early stage.
Native work on domestic computer systems. No comments here.

Starting to create the product, we realized that we already had most of the technological groundwork to provide the required functionality! Moreover, we even wrote about it on Habré:

Here we talk about how we taught our products to find the document quadrangle in the image. Adding color normalization to this functionality makes it possible to implement the technology of “scanning” a document using a mobile phone.
We have developed a training infrastructure for extremely compact computationally efficient convolutional neural networks (you can read about it, for example, here, here and here). In addition, we are constantly improving our own digital image processing apparatus, paying special attention to the complexity of the algorithms used (see here, here and here). All this makes it possible to create computationally efficient recognition systems that can run both on servers and on mobile devices.
We already have experience with rigid and quasi-rigid shape recognition, where the acceptable model for changing the shape of a document is simple and clear in advance. We can recognize documents in the form of a "booklet" (passport of the Russian Federation) and a "triple booklet" (certificate of registration of prostitutes in Germany).
We have already implemented the technology for classifying complex business documents.
We have long tested the mechanism for localization and recognition of graphic elements such as "seal", "stamp", "signature", "logo", etc. We have implemented our own barcode decoder that does a great job with 1D and 2D barcodes.
We have developed a unique approach to document authenticity analysis and have already implemented it in our passport recognition product.
All components of our platform work on Elbrus! And they also wrote about it here, here and here.

As a result, we succeeded. So, we are pleased to present you our new product that fully meets the above requirements - Smart Document Engine. What can he do?

Smart Document Engine 9 functionality0113

Rigid shape classification and recognition. Rigid forms are documents, different copies of which coincide "through the light" when the details are removed. The Smart Document Engine contains algorithms for fast localization and rigid forms on scans, photographs and video streams, which makes it possible to parse such documents.

Classification and recognition of flexible shapes. Flexible forms are documents whose elements and details can change their relative position on the form. Examples of flexible forms are tax and accounting documents, such as a 2-NDFL certificate, a company's balance sheet, a statement of financial results, etc.

Analysis of documents of arbitrary type. Smart Document Engine allows you to recognize and analyze documents of arbitrary type (power of attorney, consent, contract). Using the Smart Document Engine, you can classify such documents, extract details, verify the presence of signatures and seals, etc.

Support for scans, photos and videos. The Smart Document Engine can recognize documents and forms from both images taken from flatbed and line scanners, as well as photos and videos taken from smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.

Analysis of multipage documents. Smart Document Engine allows you to classify and recognize multi-page documents. Processing a sequence of pages allows you to simplify the process of streaming scanning, sorting the stream and checking for the presence of necessary documents.

Recognition of text attributes. The stack of localization and character recognition technologies implemented in the Smart Document Engine system allows you to quickly and accurately recognize single-line and multi-line text fields in more than 100 languages, extract details from solid text, typewritten and handwritten fields in the layout, and much more.

Label and checkbox recognition. The Smart Document Engine accurately and reliably recognizes marks and checkboxes, whether printed or in pen.

Check for presence and recognition of handwritten notes and signatures. The Smart Document Engine allows you to extract handwritten fields and signatures, recognize digital fields made by hand in free form, and verify the presence of marks and signatures.

Table recognition. The Smart Document Engine implements search and recognition of tabular data. Supported tables with a rigid structure, relational and non-relational, tables with a variable number of columns and structured sets of requisites with layout.

Search and recognition of seals. The Smart Document Engine is equipped with modules for fast detection, localization and classification of seals. In addition to searching for and verifying the presence of a seal, the platform allows the recognition of individual text components of seals.

Check for keywords and phrases . To identify significant phrases, as well as to detect incorrect changes in the text, the Smart Document Engine system allows you to check the presence of keywords, phrases and phrases.

Document completion control. Using the Smart Document Engine, you can control the filling of a document, including checking for the presence of mandatory text or graphic fields, and analyzing areas of the document intended for handwritten or handwritten filling.

Control of the absence of blots, corrections and other marks. The Smart Document Engine system allows you to detect, localize and recognize blots, strikethroughs, corrections and other marks on a document in order to control its reliability and extract additional information.

Control of logos and other graphic elements . Smart Document Engine allows you to detect, localize and control the presence of graphic elements such as company logos, as well as important graphic fields of documents, such as a photograph pasted into a questionnaire.

Document color check . The Smart Document Engine system determines both the color of the document as a whole and its individual elements (seals and signatures), which makes it possible to detect a black-and-white copy of the document.

Analysis of text field attributes. In addition to recognizing text fields, the Smart Document Engine analyzes the attributes of fields and individual text characters, such as font characteristics (presence of serifs, italics, boldness), uniformity and monotony scores, etc.

What banking processes does the Smart Document Engine solve?

1. Automation of the account opening process. Smart Document Engine makes it possible not only to read and enter data into the bank's information system, but also to verify the document: check that all required fields are filled in, check for signatures and seals, and perform cross-checks.

2. Automation of the loan approval process. Smart Document Engine speeds up and automates the decision to issue a loan for both individuals and legal entities by recognizing the 2-NDFL Certificate, Balance Sheet, Statement of Financial Results.

3. Automation of mobile agents. Thanks to full standalone operation on mobile devices, Smart Document Engine provides scanning, recognition and verification of completed questionnaires and other documents in the field.

A reader immersed in banking topics will independently find a dozen more useful applications of our new product. The important thing is that Smart Document Engine eliminates the routine of data entry, reducing the number of errors and freeing up valuable minutes to work with the client, and also expands the scope of RBS.

What do we have as a result?

A modern mobile phone allows using the Smart Document Engine to recognize a stream of document images from a specialized document scanner with a capacity of up to 30 pages per minute, which was previously available only to high-performance workstations or servers, providing the highest accuracy of recognition of text, digital and other document data. So, recognition of the 2-NDFL certificate on the Galaxy S10 phone takes less than 3 seconds on average. The system equally well and quickly processes both scans of questionnaires and photographs, automatically performing all the actions necessary for classification, data extraction from them and text recognition, taking into account geometric distortions, differences and irregularities in lighting typical for photographs.

Smart Document Engine out of the box recognizes a certificate of tax registration of a citizen of the Russian Federation (TIN), a 2-NDFL certificate, a payment order (form 0401060), a balance sheet (form 0710001), a statement of financial results (form 0710002), as well as certificates on the results of PCR analyzes of several popular laboratories in Russia. Smart Document Engine can be configured to recognize other documents (custom contracts and forms, agreements and powers of attorney, etc.).

Thus, we have created a complete line of products that meet all the needs of RBS in recognition systems. Smart ID Engine automates the input of the client's personal data (recognition of a passport, driver's licenses, etc.) and authenticates ID documents, solves the problem of face verification. Smart Code Engine solves the problem of quickly extracting and entering all the necessary data from a payment card to complete a transaction (bank card recognition), and also allows you to recognize QR Code, AZTEC, PDF417 and other 1D and 2D barcodes. And finally, our new flagship product - Smart Document Engine - solves the tasks of document recognition related to the registration and maintenance of legal entities, as well as processing a set of documents required for credit scoring, online accounting, and making payments.

Form Recognizer: New Form Recognition Capability - Cloud Service Provider

Jul 23, 2019 | Azure, News

One of the latest tools in the Azure AI Suite, Form Recognizer uses advanced machine learning to accurately extract text, key-value pairs, and tables from documents. Having only a few samples, it forms its own algorithm for recognizing and extracting the above elements on the supplied documents, both local and cloud.

Running utility in test mode

Form recognition aims to make it easier for companies to use hidden information in business documents such as forms. Now developers have simplified the processing of one of the most common documents in business - receipts. The new built-in Form Recognizer API identifies and retrieves key information such as transaction time and date, merchant details, tax amount, and more.

Expense reporting optimization

Reporting business expenses can be burdensome for everyone involved. Filling out and approving reports manually takes a lot of time for both employees and managers. In addition to lost productivity, there are also a number of auditing bottlenecks in expense reporting. Automatic extraction of merchant and transaction information from receipts may gradually replace the manual method of compiling them.

Given the proliferation of mobile cameras, modern expense reports often include images of receipts that look faded, wrinkled, and papers shot in poor lighting conditions. Existing solutions for obtaining information from receipts are usually designed to work with high quality scanned images and are not reliable enough to cope with the cases described above.

Enhance your expense reporting process with pre-built capabilities

Form Recognizer simplifies common expense reporting problems so it really adds value to your business. By using the receipts API to retrieve information about salespeople and transactions, developers can open up new possibilities in the HR system. And because the pre-built version works off the shelf and requires no training, it reduces the time it takes to deploy.

Expense applications using Form Recognizer can prepopulate expense reports with key information extracted from receipts. This saves employees time and allows them to focus on their core tasks.