Shapes, Shapes ALL around - so many shapes that can be found!

For our craft activity on Monday, January 7th the children were given a bowl full of shapes, and they were to pick out and sort the shapes and then glue them onto the coordinating shape on their paper. The 3 shapes were: CIRCLES, TRIANGLES, and SQUARES. You probably noticed on your child's art project that there might have been a few misplaced shapes - I tried to have them self-correct their work and look through to make sure that each shape matched the "criteria" - so we didn't catch ALL the misplaces shapes, however I was very impressed at how intent they were working, and how fun it was to watch them figure out how they wanted to space, clump, or "arrange" the shapes onto their page, and just how many they did get right on their own...so many more than the misplaced shapes. What a smart group of children!

A fun shape activity that we did this past Monday (1/14) - is that I put out a pile of straws (all the same length at first) and had the children count and choose 4 straws. We worked at taking the 4 straws and making our own square - I would demonstrate when needed but emphasized that each child should try on their own and do their own work...they experimented, made mistakes and did a hooray when they got it right, and we really worked on getting everyone to express and explain how they needed to fix their shape so that it would look like a square...this was the hardest part of the activity for everyone!

We then used the straws to make triangles all the same size, and then I cut the straws into varied lengths and then the students chose another 3 straws (counting each time they chose something) and we made triangles again, pointing out that the lengths of triangles can be the same or different - but they ALWAYS have 3 sides. We also used the cut straws to make rectangles and then went back and did different sized squares. We talked about why we couldn't use the straws for a circle - we tried one for a bit, and the children quickly saw that the straight lines would not work for the roundness that is needed to make a circle...so a ribbon was used as a perfect solution!

This is a great, easy and fun activity to do at home. You can use the straws to make shapes, you can also make multiple shapes together to create a picture (a triangle roof and a square shaped house), and you can also make some of the letters of the alphabet (letter 'A', 'M', 'N', 'T' and so on). Another wonderful way to help our children see that shapes are all around us, is to look through your house, out the car window - anywhere you are and play 'I Spy a Shape' - you can play by just calling out the shapes, trying to have each other guess what shape you are looking at by describing what color it is, if it is high, low, by another shape, or with letters or numbers on it...it's a great game to bring in a lot of learning! Seeing shapes in our environment is not only fun - but it's a great beginning to math concepts and skills, general observation, and having children express what they see and know!

Now, enjoy a shape search together!