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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

What are regular and irregular shapes?

What are regular and irregular shapes?
We explain what regular and irregular shapes are and suggest mnemonics to help children remember how many sides different shapes have. We also have examples of the types of questions primary-school children might be asked about shapes.

What are regular and irregular shapes?

Regular shapes have sides that are all equal and interior (inside) angles that are all equal.

Irregular shapes have sides and angles of any length and size.

Here are various different shapes in regular and irregular forms:

Regular pentagon, regular hexagon, regular octagon


Irregular pentagon, irregular hexagon, irregular octagon
 

Learning about shapes: number-of-sides mnemonics

Children in Key Stage 2 learn lots of facts about polygons and need to know how many sides a pentagon, hexagon and octagon have. A few tips to help them remember:
 

  • A good way to help them remember this, is to show them a picture of the Pentagon building in America and get them to count the sides.
  • A teacher may point out that a hexagon has an 'x' in it, as does the word 'six', which is how many sides it has.
  • An octagon has eight sides, just as an octopus has eight legs.

Children need to be aware that ANY shape with five sides is a pentagon, just as ANY shape with six sides is a hexagon and ANY shape with eight sides is a hexagon. They can get very used to just seeing the shape in its regular form, but need to be reminded of the irregular versions as well.

Children may be asked a question similar to the following:

Put a tick on the two octagons:

(The third and fourth shapes are octagons.)

 

As they move up Key Stage 2, they may be asked to think about various properties of a group of shapes and then complete a table, for example:

Look at these shapes and then fill in the table. The first one has been done for you:


This is the completed answers table: