Shapes & Play-Doh Fun

Topic: Two dimensional shapes

Over the past few weeks, I have been watching the students play during their free time sessions at the end of the day and it shocked me that many of them were already creating patterns with unifix cubes and pattern blocks! Since the topic of shapes is one that children are "naturally" excited to learn about, I knew that I would have a lot of fun teaching these concepts to them! 

Question: On Wednesday, I began my introductory lesson to shapes. During the morning message and calendar session of the day, I asked students if they could give me the name of a shape. All of the students were able to name at least one shape, which was wonderful, and knowing students' prior knowledge before beginning my lesson was a great teaching tool. I was able to cater my lesson to the needs of my students by emphasizing the shapes that they hadn't mentioned.

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Greeting: Each morning we have a greeting during our Morning Meeting session. I used a blow up ball with shapes and uppercase letters on it to encourage students to greet one another by throwing the ball and looking to see where their right thumb lands on the ball. The students identified the two dimensional shape and  the uppercase letter that their thumb was touching. This was a very fun activity for them, and it gave me more insight as to which students were comfortable with shape identification, and which were not. 

Our shape friends proudly displayed in our classroom!

I began my lesson on shapes by introducing my kindergarten students to my shape friends. I found these wonderful shape posters and poems from the blog Miss Kindergarten, and they were a huge hit! Each shape has a cute name and a poem that describes them. The students waved to the shape characters and greeted them by name as I introduced them. It was adorable! These posters are currently displayed on our closet doors, as you see above, but we had a lot of fun passing them around while talking about them and counting their number of sides.

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Once I introduced the shape friends, it was time to read a book about them! I read The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns, which is a wonderful book that illustrates how shapes are everywhere. It also introduces the concepts of sides and angles, because this greedy little triangle thinks he won't be happy unless he has just one more side and one more angle. Students watched in awe as the shape shifted from one shape to another by just adding one more side and one more angle each time.

I was shocked when I came upon the word 'quadrilateral' and students were able to use context clues in order to figure out  that a quadrilateral has four sides. We had a great discussion about how shapes can have four sides, and then we pointed to our shape friends to see which of them also had four sides.

Little hands working hard!

After our read aloud, it was time to start working with shapes!  I found these wonderful Play-Doh mats from the blog Life Over C's. They have an outline of the two dimensional shape on one side, a picture to relate the shape to on the other side, and a space for students to practice writing the name of the shape. I laminated these to use with Play-Doh, and I could easily give the students dry erase markers to trace the letters in the shape names later on in the year.

We rolled balls of Play-Doh into long strips to act as the sides we needed to use to create an outline of our shapes. After talking about the number of sides that certain shapes have, it was a lot of fun to create those sides individually with Play-Doh, and then connect them together on the mat outlines.

Some students had enough Play-Doh to fill in their shapes after they had finished the outline!

There were plenty of excited squeals and "A-Ha!" moments this afternoon as students related the shapes they were creating to the shape friends we had met earlier. Some students even ran over to the closet to point to which shape they had just made, and to see if it looked "just right."

Once they saw me with the camera, they began calling for me. "Ms. Preston! I'm done! Can you take a picture of it?" The answer was always: "Of course!"

As I saw students finishing up their shapes I would walk over and ask them, "Which shape did you just make?" The proud expressions on students' faces said it all - they knew exactly what shape they had made, and they were loving it. 

I would say that we learned a lot during our first shapes lesson! I can't wait for my next lesson, which falls on Halloween, when we use circles, squares, triangles, and rectangles to create geometric bats. It's easy to say that I'm obsessed with kindergarten lesson planning.