Preschool Art & Story Time: Shapes

 This fall I am working with some of the youngest artists to combine my love for books and art!  We kicked off our 8 week series with a story time on Shapes.  These kiddos are ages 18 months to 3 years and attend this 45 minutes story time with a grown-up.

We started with reading the book Circle by Jon Klassen.  It is part of the shape trilogy, and seriously these three books are in my top ten children’s books. They also make me super happy because they are about an element of art, shape!

I then cut out shapes out of paper, laminated them and handed them out to the group.  I had circles, rectangles, squares, triangles, and diamonds.  I held up a shape, and we sang this little rhyme:

Do you know what shape this is,

Shape this is, shape this is,

Do you know what shape this is,

And do you have one too?

If you do then give it a shake, give it a shake, give it a shake

If you then give it a shake, and shout hooray for triangles! 

Our next great shape book was the Color Zoo by Lois Elhert. This book has fun shape cut outs and is neat to explore. All the animals are made of shapes!

Then, I had four independent centers for the kids to explore.  My goal for this class was to have many process-based, open-ended experiences that the preschoolers could participate in without help, or minimal assistance. 

The first station was using toilet paper tubes in a circle, triangle or square shape to stamp onto a piece of paper. 

I also turned one of my easels into a giant geo-board, and the students made lots of interesting shapes!  To make this giant geo board, I drilled holes into a piece of plywood, and found these wood pegs at JoAnn Fabrics and hot glued them in the holes.  For the “rubber bands” I cut strips of t-shirt yarn and tied them together to make loops.  The jersey fabric allowed for the material to stretch easily over the pegs.

On the other side of this board, I have a felt board, which I left free to explore with different colored felt shapes. Grown-ups and their kids were having fun at this station making shape pictures together. 

Finally, I had bingo daubers and shape pages, to help develop and master one-to-one correspondence and hand-eye coordination (plus it’s fun)!