Kindergarten Math: Shapes Activity Centers

I finally compiled my son's favorite SHAPE activities (centers) for the past months into one HUGE product!  Introducing the KINDERGARTEN MATH SHAPES ACTIVITY CENTERS, the first in a series of our KINDERGARTEN MATH collection.

Below, you will find the list of activities included in this fun and engaging printable set, plus a preview of the materials on how we put them into action! (You can view more on our Instagram account).

Montessori Geometric Solids as a Sensorial Material

I would like to introduce one of our favourite Montessori material at home: the geometric solids.  This has been on my bucket list for the longest time and I finally get to own one!  This is totally worth-it!  This material will introduce the child to the 3D objects and shapes, that will later on be helpful in the learning of geometry.  I listed below the progression of activities of the geometric solid intended to guide parents on how to use this material in case you own one or are planning to have one in the future.

Hands-on Learning of Geometric Shapes

Vito is currently in the mood for learning geometric shapes.  I guess he was inspired by his older brother who is currently studying basic geometry at home. Vito has passed the stage of basic shapes, the ones you see in children’s puzzles and the like.  He’s been playing with those since he was a toddler, so I decided to introduce him to geometric shapes in the Montessori classroom.  It would have been nice if we own the Geometric Cabinet, but because we can’t afford one and we don’t have space for it, these insets which are basically materials for writing is a good alternative (best to none).  Note that these are not the traditional metal insets, we are using the plastic version.

Our Leaf Shapes Study

It’s Mavi’s midterm break this week, and I decided to have activities that both boys can do together.  First in mind is a leaf study since we are surrounded by beautiful and colorful leaves.  They are just too gorgeous when they change colors, and I don’t want to miss that opportunity!  We also used our Montessori Inspired Leaf Shapes printable for this activity, which you can buy from my shop.

Guide to Math Homeschool Materials for Preschoolers

I’m often asked about the math homeschool materials we used at home (for preschoolers), so I made this list and hope it will serve as your guide in finding the right educational materials for your homeschool or classroom adventure.  I believe that we need to expose our kids to math early on by giving them the appropriate learning materials to explore and discover.  These materials will introduce your child to nine major math concepts:  numbers and quantity, shapes and patterns, picture graphs, length, time, money, fractions, mass and volume.

Tree Shapes Outdoor Activity (Worksheet and Printable)

Because of the wonderful weather, I decided to throw a Botany Unit for this month.  We've got plenty of trees around the estate, all with different shapes so I was thinking that we should jump-start our Botany lessons with Tree Shapes.

So I made him a learning material that would help us identify the tree shapes in our estate... and hopefully use it this weekend as we visit the park.  This is an activity sheet that is included in the printable material, Tree Shapes.  We've also brought along our green do-a-dot marker with our worksheet.

Letter L: Leaf Activities in Autumn

We are joining the bandwagon of autumn-themed activities and for Vito, we’re having leaf activities!

Leaf Color Matching

Got these beautiful craft leaves from a local store and used them for sorting colors.  I just dumped them in a container and would take one leaf at a time. I then mention the color and placed it to where it belongs.  Vito loves calling out their names!  I am not sure if he could recognize colors yet, it’s a hit or miss for him.  It’s a challenge to put up a color sorting activity for him so I put an extra effort on making it fun like making noises or funny sounds as I drop the leaf to the sorted group.

Identifying 2D Shapes in Real Life Objects

I want to share how much we love these activity cards on 2D shapes that I made last year so Vito and I can practice identifying the shapes of objects that he gets to see almost everyday.  As I mentioned in my Instagram post, before working on these cards, we first looked around the house for objects with shapes of square, triangle, oval, rectangle, and circle.  Then at times, we also play I spy games on shapes and objects, and other times it’s more of “give me something that has a shape of … “.  We had fun doing this!

The Montessori Geometric Sticks

We finally get to use our Montessori Geometric Sticks now that Mavi is learning about polygons, triangles and angles.  You can purchase this fantastic learning material at any Montessori shop or in Amazon.  My boys and I are fascinated with this material.  There’s so much we can do with it, from building plane geometric shapes, to letters, and artworks!

Learning Shapes for Toddlers

** contains affiliate links **

Vito’s sensitive years has begun and he’s been learning a lot since I last posted his 21 months learning materials! With his current interest in letters and shapes,  Vito and I has been doing lots of play-based learning in the morning before his nap time.  Now this doesn’t take hours.  It’s a maximum of 10 minutes per learning material that he picks. 

So far he can recognize the following shapes:

triangle

circle

oval

square

star

He can’t pronounce their names properly though (except for star and circle), but yes he can say their names in a toddlerish cute way.

So here’s a summary of what we’ve been using to name and recognize shapes.

Melissa & Dough Jumbo Shape Puzzle

This is his favourite! He works on this everyday.  Working on this board, you need to say the name of the shape of the puzzle holder, and point to its match (say also its name) and then place the puzzle in the board.

This is available from here.

Playskool Shape Sorter

This toy has been on the shelf for ages!  I first made him use square, star and circle.  Then added oval and diamond and now, he has mastered half of the shapes!

This shape form fitter is available here.

Cookie Cutters and Playdough

The cookie cutters were bought from the local store. I love the colors and the differential sizes!  This is similar to the cookie cutters that I have.

And this is how he forms a star and a square all at the same time!

And yes, we do get to use them as stencils too!

 

Miniland Shape Sorting

This is one of my favourite purchases this year.  I love that we can do lots of things with this, from color and shape sorting, lacing and counting!  This is not his favourite pick though, so we might NOT be working on this for the meantime.  This Miniland Abacus Shapes can be bought from here.

Gluing Shapes

We stopped using glue because Vito didn’t like it.  Now that he’s a lot bigger, I re-introduced it once again and he’s not afraid of it anymore!  This is just a simple activity of sticking shapes into an art paper using buds. 

As you can see, I’m teaching him how to apply glue on a piece of paper

And he placed them on the paper of course, but on the wrong side and added some more glue on it!

 

Melissa and Doug Pattern Blocks

And the newest addition is this learning material from Melissa and Doug.  This is quite popular and the boys love it! Yes, not only Vito but Mavi is using it too!  Worth-it if you have multiple kids    Vito has been practicing this fish as he can recognize the triangle and oval right away.  He know what shape it has by picking the right blocks, but he still can’t fit them properly on the picture.  We’ll be playing more of this!

You can this from here.

And that’s about it! Hope this will give you an idea of materials and activities when learning shapes with your kids!  Don’t forget to pin this for later!

Toddler Activity Trays (34 Months)

We are doing seasonal activities this week (autumn) so our activity trays, which are mostly for enhancement of fine motor skills are focused on shapes.  Below are the 6 shape activities for Vito.  Most of these are homemade and easy to setup.

Learning about Geometric Shapes

Vito is 29 months old.
To start our Shape Unit this week, I want to share with you Vito’s current favourite learning material! This amazing product is from Learning Resources and both of my boys has been using the activity sheets for days!

Shapes Resist Painting

Vito is 29 months old.

Here’s another interesting way you can get your kids to learn about shapes. I was telling Vito we’ll do magic, and look for shapes in the black paper.  He was fascinated of what he will discover after covering the cardstock with paint!

Real Life 3D Activity Cards

As an extension work for our Montessori Solids and real life 2D Shapes activities, Vito and I had fun working on our 3D real life activity cards weeks ago.  We used our geometric solids so Vito can have a real understanding of what these objects look and feel like.  To know more about these solids, I talked about it here.  If these are not available, Amazon carries Learning Resources 3D materials which are perfect alternatives for these Montessori solids.

Favorite Activities at 43 months

Here are Vito’s favourite things to do when he’s at home and not playing with Mavi outdoors. Most of these activities promotes independent play minimal supervision, improves fine motor skills, vocabulary, hand-eye coordination, creativity and discovery through play.

Montessori Inspired February Activities for Preschoolers

Vito is 39 months old.

Thank goodness January is almost over!  I really don’t like January, it’s that time of the year where we get to experience the worst weather condition.  Fortunately, we have fair weather this year, it’s actually warm!  But, I am so looking forward to spring now, and I can’t wait for all these gloomy days to be over.  And speaking of spring, this month, I’ll start adding “spring” activities into our homeschool activities.  We will be using traditional Montessori materials for most part and in some, we’ll have themed activities.  Hope you like what I prepared for Vito for this month.

3D Shapes

A few weeks ago, we revisited 3D Shapes.  We previously had this activity using cards and our paper models.  They were a hit!

My son never showed interest on 3D shapes and neither was I.  All I could ever remember was those grueling memorization of formulas in my Engineering class. I never liked geometry LOL.

Because the papers are now gone, I bought wooden 3D shapes in Absorbent Minds.  I bought the small one as we don’t have enough storage here.  Well, he was quite into it this time.  I have to explain why there are called 3D. We made basic shapes (squares, rectangle, circle etc) by pressing the wooden 3Ds on a playdough.

          

Next we tried forming the shapes using craft sticks and plasticine. I’ve seen this activity multiple times in other blogs and thought it was easy to make. But I was wrong! LOL.  They were actually hard to form :) But nevertheless Mavi and I enjoyed it.  We laughed hard each time a shape is broken LOL.  The plasticine didn’t hold the stick that much. I wonder if marshmallows would be a better alternative?

          

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!

MEGA Collection of BOTANY Unit Studies

Finally, I compiled all our botany lessons in one post. It’s easier to make it as a reference in the future and to you dear readers as well! These are the activities we have done for the past years, when Mavi was still in preschool.  I hope you find all of these helpful in your own homeschool journey.  Just click any of the links below, to direct you to the specific post.

(In no specific order)

• Learning about flowers. This is THE FIRST TIME we dissected a flower and Mavi had a fabulous time learning about the parts!
• The Tree. Our FIRST LESSON ON TREES and comes with a DIY tree felt puzzle
• Parts of a plant. Mavi was only 2 years old here when we study the different parts of a plant using nomenclature cards.  Was he bored? No!! He had fun looking for the different parts in grandma’s garden.
• Fruits and Vegetables Unit
• The Bean Seed. Identify the parts of a bean seed and observed how they sprout.
• The Plant. Mavi was attending Montessori preschool and brought home his plants.  We review the parts of a plant using a real  one at home. 
• Looking into Trees and Leaves.  We matched leaf shapes, create trees in different seasons and identify the parts of the leaf/tree.
• The Plant Life Cycle (Photosynthesis).  We did a little experiment on how water travels through the plants.
• Tree Shapes. Yes! Trees have different form and shapes.  We worked on this outdoors and identified the shapes of the trees in our yard. How fun!
• The Poinsettia.  Seasonal lesson, especially during Christmas.
• Leaf Shapes.  Montessori-inspired activities. We collected leaves in the park and matched our collection to the leaf shapes nomenclature card.
• Inside of a fruit.  Making fruit prints!
• Life Cycle of an Apple.  Lots of crafting!
• All about flowers [1] and [2].  We usually study flowers in springtime.  Here we looked into the different parts by dissecting a flower, collected flowers in the yard and used it as a paint brush.. and more outdoor flower observation.
• Flower DIY foam puzzle.
• Parts of an apple and tomato.  Yes, we dissected these!

 

You can also visit my Pinterest board for more ideas!

Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Botany Unit on Pinterest.

Creating Shapes with Geomag

Vito is 29 months old.

Have you heard of Geomag? We have this for years now but kept it because Vito used to mouth things. Now that he’s outgrown that behavior, I finally took it out and since then the boys had been using these magnets to create shapes and structures!

Repurposing Flashcards: Shapes and Colors

When Mavi was about 1, I had these flashcards which was given to me by a friend.  I couldn’t find any use for them at that time because Mavi wasn’t into flashcards.  He easily gets bored with them.  So what I did was use it as a control card for sorting. 

First I made a replica of all the shapes in the cards using a cardstock.  I made sure that the shape cut-outs will have the same color and size to the ones on the flash cards.  

 

Then I presented the cards to Mavi as I introduce the shapes.  I started with only 2 or 3 shapes so he won’t get overwhelmed.    Then as I place the cut-outs, I instructed him to match them with flashcards. 

It was really interesting because I’ve witnessed the level concentration my son had on sorting.  He examined the shapes well, eyeing each card carefully  then cautiously place the cut-outs on the correct control card.  I didn’t interfere, I just sat there and observe him as he sorted out the shapes.  There were instances he gets confused, then that’s the time I offered my assistance.  And as he progressed, he started developing his own technique in sorting, which as really an amazing thing to watch from a 1.5 years old. 

So you might want to try this in case you have excess flashcards and have no idea on how to repurpose it in your home “school”.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner