Straight, curved and partly curved paths worksheet
A sheet of paths, and one job: tick the box that says how each path goes. Straight, curved, or partly straight and partly curved. A short teaching panel at the top of the page gives the child all three words and what they mean, so the sheet works on its own. Free, no account, no ads.
How hard the paths are to sort
Curved paths bend a lot, and a path that is partly straight has a long straight part. New version prints a fresh set at the same level.
How many paths
How long the sheet is, not how hard it is. Every path is drawn in the same size box whichever you pick.
Adds a second page for the adult with the three words, a note on the mathematics behind them, the three mistakes children usually make, and the answer key. The child's page is unchanged.
Straight, Curved and Partly Curved Paths
Tick one box for each path.
Curved paths bend a lot, and a path that is partly straight has a long straight part.
Three answers, one kind of thing
Everything on this sheet is a path. What changes is its form: a straight path does not bend, a curved path bends all the way along, and some paths are straight in one part and curved in another. Those are three descriptions of one kind of object, not three different objects, and keeping that straight from the start saves a lot of confusion later.
The third answer is the one that teaches
Most children sort quickly into bent and not bent. The path that is partly straight and partly curved breaks that habit, because it is both, and the only way to answer is to look at the whole path rather than glance at it. On the hardest level the straight part is short and can sit at either end or in the middle, so a quick glance is never enough.
Why the levels get harder
Each level takes away a shortcut rather than changing the question. On the first, the curved paths bend a lot, so one look at how bendy a path is gives the answer. On the second, the bends are gentle, so the child has to look for the bend instead of seeing it. On the third, the straight part of a mixed path is as short as it can be while still being clearly visible, so noticing it is the whole task.
A note on the word curve
The sheet says curved, which is a word about form, and it never calls a path a curve. That is deliberate. In mathematics proper, a curve just means a continuous path, and a straight one counts, so setting straight against curve as if they were two different kinds of thing would be wrong. Describing one kind of object three ways avoids the problem entirely, and the teacher page says all of this in full for the adult.
Where it fits
This sits alongside points and line segments, which asks a different question about the same family of figures: whether a figure has any length at all. Either can come first. When both are secure, naming shapes in identify the shapes is the natural next step. For plain written practice at any level, you can make a worksheet in seconds.