Take your child’s knowledge of shapes out of the classroom and into the real world! A geometric photo collage is the perfect way to apply maths lessons to a practical and funky art activity.

Photo credit: Education.com

What You Need

  • Cardboard (A4 or A3)
  • Glue
  • Camera

What You Do

  1. Let your child wander the house or garden with a camera. Help them to take pictures of angles: right angles, acute angles, and obtuse angles. Remind them to look in places they might not normally associate with angles. Tree branches are a great place to find acute and obtuse angles, and corners of the house all make perfect right angles.
  2. Print their photographs.
  3. Have your child categorise each photo, making different piles for each type of angle.
  4. Get them to glue the photographs onto a corner of the cardboard. Try and keep the angles all together – a lot more geometric figures are going to be added and you don’t want the shapes to mix too much!
  5. Repeat steps 1-4, this time taking photos of perpendicular and parallel lines, and two-dimensional shapes like squares, rectangles, circles, ovals, and triangles.
  6. If your child is feeling especially ambitious, encourage them to take pictures of three-dimensional shapes like spheres, cones, cylinders, pyramids, and cubes.
  7. Arrange all the shapes on the cardboard, keeping each type of geometric shape in its own area. Encourage your child to overlap the pictures. When the cardboard is completely covered, they’ll have an artistic poster featuring shapes from around their own home!

Our geometric photo collage!

If you have difficulty finding particular shapes, get creative with props! We arranged some pens and lego to make our perpendicular line photos. Remind your child that you’re just relating real world objects to geometric shapes; if your kid is a little perfectionist, point out a few examples and explain you aren’t looking for laser cut precision in the lines!

We had a blast designing our geometric photo collage poster. My two kids worked together to arrange the photos. One child did the handwritten labels and the other drew the decorative symbols. For speedy (and adjustable) positioning, we used a glue stick to lightly tack the photos into position and I added some white glue around the edges afterwards.

This activity would be great for a cross-curricula Maths and Art/DT lesson, or as a fun craftivity session. What do you think? Something to try the next time your kids claim to be bored? 🙂


Geometric photo collage activity designed by the Education.com content team, and edited by SLOAH.