ABSTRACT
This chapter provides information on an activity that the author had suggested to the teachers in a small school in North Yorkshire. The activity involved visualising whether or not a range of nets of cubes would ‘fold up’ to make a cube. The children had created the nets by drawing all the different arrangements of six squares they could think of. Once they had decided which they thought would fold up into cubes, they cut them out to check their conjectures. This simple activity embraces two of the key skills teachers need to teach children to help them understand shape. They need to be able to visualise the shapes that we are working with and they need to be able to describe them so that someone else can visualise the same shape. We do this by having a clear understanding of the properties of different shapes.
