Shapes
Learn Shapes through play.
Shapes are easiest to learn where they actually live: the round clock, the rectangular door, the triangle of a roof. A shape hunt round the kitchen sticks better than a page of outlines because the child is doing the finding.
These activities go both ways — spotting shapes that are already there, and making them from sticks, straws, dough, tape and cut paper. Building a square from four straws teaches something a picture of a square does not: it has four sides, and they are the same length.
Squashed shapes count. A triangle drawn with three wobbly lines is still a triangle, and saying so keeps a child trying.
Activities
-
Print Hearts With a Cardboard Tube
Squash a kitchen roll tube into a heart shape and use it as a stamp. One tube makes forty hearts.
-
A Shape Hunt Round the House
Circles, squares and triangles are already everywhere. Give them a list and let them find them.
-
Winter Play When It Is Too Cold to Go Out
Ice, torches, dens and paper snowflakes. The four things that reliably fill a dark afternoon.