I love to be sneaky with using vocabulary in the classroom. One of the ways that I like to embed it is through game playing. For example, instead of using two color counters, we pull out the pattern blocks. Instead of saying “I want blue!”, I tell the students that I would like them to sound more like a fancy mathematician. Instead you must say, “I would like to play with the trapezoid, please.” It causes a laugh with the kids, but even better it starts to get them to use those words more regularly and with purpose. Plus they love to say the word trapezoid! There is a nice benefit to getting these words in their mind early, they’ll start to connect that vocabulary to real world examples of lines, points, segments and other geometry terms.

There is a natural reason to determine the difference between the two tools in the photo below, and to examine how the rhombus and trapezoid are different so that they know which one to pick. This can start as early as the primary levels! Most pattern block sets come with hexagons, triangles, rhombuses, parallelograms, and trapezoids.