Home

Blog

Contact Me

Master the Kite Shape from recognition to construction.

The Kite Shape is usually introduced to your child in Kindergarten or First Grade. When this shape is introduced it usually coincides with the introduction of the rhombus. The reason for this is due to the similarities of the two.

The seven steps detailed bellow take you from basic identification all the way through to taking a detailed look at the theorems involving the kite. These steps also include 'pit stops' to complete fun geometry projects and coloring sheets.

These are nice 'breathers' on the learning curve, but they are excellent ways of reinforcing the new knowledge in ways that your kid can get a real life, hands on approach to understanding the basic geometry concepts included.

Okay, so let's get started ...

Identify

How do we know what we look at is a Kite?

First and fore most it is a quadrilateral which is a 4 sided plane shape.

It has 4 lines
It is composed of two pairs of lines equal in length.
The opposite Angles formed at the intersection of DIFFERENT length lines are equal in size.
The angle formed by lines connecting OPPOSITE angles will always be 90 degrees.
A Kite cannot be described as any other shape..

The table bellow is intended to be read from left to right. Chose any shape from the left hand column, and by moving right, you can see what other shape qualities it posesses.

			Simple	Quadrilaterals
	Square	Rectangle	Parallelogram	Isosceles Trapezoid	Trapezoid	Rhombus	Kite
Square	X	X	X	X	X	X	X
Rectangle		X	X	X	X
Parallelogram			X		X
Isosceles Trapezoid				X	X
Trapezoid					X
Rhombus						X	X
Kite							X

Once your child is comfortable with how to recognize the shape, offer them some shape worksheets to see how they get on with identifying the shape when compared with others. You may also find our Quadrilateral Family Tree Printable a useful tool to offer your child.

Calculate Area and Perimeter

How to calculate the Area and Perimeter of a Kite.

Please note your child WILL be expected to remember these formula.

The Area of this shape is calculated by multiplying the lengths of its diagonals and dividing by two. If your child has problems understanding the concept of Area, I recomend working with second grade 'grid method' worksheets first, and then move on to fourth grade worksheets using numbers and finally word problems.

The Perimeter of ANY shape is simply the sum total of all the lengths of the shape.
The perimeter of a kite is the sum of its lengths.
However, since we have two pairs of the same length, the formula is simplified to reflect this!

How to construct a Kite

To complete this, you will need a ruler, pencil, compass, protractor, and a blank piece of paper!

Note: I do not go into a great deal of detail of the construction here, as how you go about constructing your shape depends entirely on the information given to you.
The easiset way to construct a kite, is by constructing two isoscoles triangles sharing the same base line.

Relationship to 3D Shapes

There are no 3d Figures an elementary student will have to study in relation to the kite.

Geometric Coloring Sheets

The use of coloring sheets allows your child to start experimenting with different shapes. A great first step is to encourage your child to color in shapes adjacent to eachoter with the same color, until their shape starts to look like 'something'. Perhaps that something will be a rectangle or a house. By doing this, your child will start to realize the connection between the shapes. You will find some nice free geometric coloring pages to download here.