Fun With Shapes in Preschool
A great way to introduce your preschoolers to shapes while exercising their creativity, problem solving, and math skills is to encourage 'shape art'. To prepare for this activity, spend time tracing and cutting out different shapes from brightly colored construction paper. To keep things simple, restrict your preschoolers' exposure to squares, triangles, circles, and rectangles. Provide each of your students with a piece of craft paper and encourage them to use their shapes to create common objects such as a dog, a truck, a flower, etc. While these 'pictures' will be far from perfect, students will practice shape recognition and think about ordinary objects in a new way. As a variation, prepare pages of objects ahead of time. 'Build' a truck (or other object) from shapes and trace the finished product, giving your students shape outlines with which to match their pieces. Because the children aren't designing their own objects, only matching, it can be appropriate to experiment with more complex shapes like trapezoids or octagons, etc. This is a great introductory activity while the variation above will work best when children have had practice with shapes.
