2D Shapes - Tot School

This week we have been exploring 2D shapes! My plan was to introduce shapes to my 2 year old as I reviewed some basic geometry concepts with my 5 year old. The plan worked beautifully, and my son really enjoyed the 'tot school' time and did much more of the 'teaching' than me!

Here is our shelf at the beginning of the week. We have lots of shape activities but I didn't want to overwhelm the little one with too many choices.

Trying to pull a button through a felt shape. We have squares and circles to sort and then put onto the "snake" ribbon. This idea came from one of my favorite blogs, Counting Coconuts! This is more than my daughter can do independently but it's great fine motor practice when we do it together.

 

We practiced "using basic shapes and spatial reasoning to build things and do puzzles". That sounds pretty fancy huh! These are great foam shapes from a Mother Goose training I went to a couple of years ago. My son asked for a certain shape for her to find. As she went searching for the shape, he continued to build. They worked so well together on the this project and when they were done we decided to keep it set up until Daddy could see it!



"We're going on a shape hunt"...we're going to catch a big one! Several times we went hunting for shapes and then matched the shapes to pictures in a book or to a puzzle. I was amazed at how quickly my daughter picked up the names of the basic shapes! And the way she says triangle is enough to melt your heart!

Even in the crib she was practicing shapes...here trying to match shapes

Our shape exploration will continue next week. I will get out the 3D geometric solids and we will work on finding objects in the house that match them. We will go on a triangle walk in the woods to see how many naturally occurring triangles we can find. We will sort shapes into groups and continue to build interesting shape pictures with the foam shapes and will make some paper shapes to glue onto card stock. Hmmm....maybe even make our own shape book! 

Have any great shape ideas for us? I'd love to hear them!