For a while now, Isabelle has known a star and a heart shape - neither of which she was taught, she just seemed to pick them up. We have a lot of toys in our house which have shapes, for example a shape sorter and a shape clock, and I keep thinking I need to work with her on some other shapes.However, on receiving a magnadoodle earlier this week it became clear that Isabelle actually knew circle and triangle as well so I decided to do a very quick and simple activity just to reinforce her knowledge of the shapes and the words.
It took less than two minutes to set up and I was absolutely amazed by how quickly Isabelle picked it up, and just how well she completed the activity.
All I simply did was draw the four shapes onto the tuff spot using chalk. I gathered up some of the shapes from our different activities and left them around the outside of the tuff spot. As Isabelle picked each one up we identified which shape it was - heart, circle, triangle or star - and then she popped it onto the correct shape.
I was so impressed that Isabelle got every single shape correct! She has a bit of trouble saying the word "triangle", but was still easily able to match each one to the correct area on the tuff spot. She found the thicker 3D shapes more tricky to identify, as depending on which way she picked them up to look at them, they may look nothing like the intended. For example, picking up the bigger triangle at a certain angle she just got one of the "sides" which was actually a square. So each time she picked a shape up I encouraged her to turn it over in her hands if she wasn't able to figure it out immediately and after the first few she did that herself.
The activity lasted just a few minutes as Isabelle was so confident with the shapes, but it has paved the way for similar learning activities with shapes that she doesn't know so well, and I hope in future we can extend it to letter and number matching as well. Isabelle is still very young and I know so many people don't do any real learning activities, however (and I know this is me being totally biased!) Isabelle seems to be such a smart little cookie and seems to enjoy learning new words, while enjoying tasks which take that little bit of extra thinking, so I think it's important for me to try and stretch her and give her opportunities for learning when I can. If she hadn't been interested in the activity, or if she isn't in the future if we try again, then that's fine and I won't push it at all. I want to be an enabler - not a pushy mum!
Stupidly, I didn't take any photos during the activity, so just have the end result instead.
