Colorful Counting

Shapes are a cool thing at our house. My son loves to find shapes everywhere and try saying the names. His favorite word is oval, which he doesn't totally get, but he likes the sound of it. We tried to include shapes in our counting/matching project.

Materials Needed: scissors, colored paper, pen, big white drawing paper, and glue.

Directions:
1. Cut shapes out from a variety of colors (I tried to use a different color with each shape so my little guy wouldn't get confused).

2. Trace the shapes onto a piece of big white drawing paper. I used a dark pen so that the shapes were easy to see.

3. Have your child match the shapes with the outlines. We counted each shape as we matched them.

We threw one harder shape into the mix because my son likes a challenge- OCTAGON (he calls it an "obtagon").

4. Repetition is great for learning (especially if the child is engaged and enjoying the activity), so after we matched the shapes, then we put glue on the shapes and stuck them onto their outlines.

A couple of the shapes were trickier than others for my son to glue exactly in the right spot. He did pretty well though and was proud of himself.

5. Once we were done, we did more counting as we talked about all of the shapes we'd glued.

Language Development:

In this activity we mostly focused on counting and naming the shapes. We tried to describe the shapes as we counted them, like, "we have two yellow rectangles" or "two green octagons." The activity naturally lent itself to using/practicing words like match, shape, glue, stick, press, and all the color/shapes words. For older kids, add more challenging shapes like hexagon, pentagon, oval, etc. You could also do this with pairs of their favorite objects from around the house.