Not All Hexagons Are Yellow...

I once read a shape book to a 4 year old. In the book, there was a picture of a green hexagon which I pointed out. The child looked at me and with an incredulous tone said “ that’s not a hexagon, hexagons are yellow.” I immediately knew why the child thought this. Like many PreK Classes, we have a bucket full of colorful shapes for the children to play with and in that bucket all the hexagons are yellow. 

This reminded me of two things. That often children may learn things we don’t intend them to learn. It also reminded me of Piaget’s research into centration. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centration

Educators need to always have stages of development in mind when we are talking to and teaching children. 

After talking to them a little bit, they understood that hexagons were shapes with six straight sides no matter the color.