How can an entire year (kindergarden) be dedicated to learning this info?
Errrrr..... It's not?
My K's classroom just finished the shapes last week. It took them 2 weeks. For half the classroom this was being taught in a foreign language. And this is a public school with over 75% of the kids on free lunch.
And some K classrooms go over all the shapes for a week...Then just incorporate them into other things. For example, all the tables are identified by a shape and color. My son would come home and say, "I am now sitting with Elian at the Blue Circle table." And I would say, "Where were you sitting before?" And he would say something like at the Orange Square table.
They would label bins with words and shapes-like Math and a rectangle and would say put your math books/papers in the Math bin...it has the rectangle on it. They had a poster with shapes on it. They discussed shapes as they worked on handwriting and described things in language arts and science.
Then at the end of the first nine weeks they assessed that knowledge and identified the children with further shape needs. I think there was some additional specific work in the math book in the geometry unit but other than that shapes were a non-issue. For those that needed more work there were activities in center time. But I don't think for the majority of the kids that they spent a good portion of the year working on shapes.
