Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Using craft projects to teach about shapes.

My DD1 loves nothing more than doing craft and covering herself with glue and glitter So I thought how can I turn this into teaching her something while still maintaining the fun. So I decided to go and buy the shinyest and preetiest paper I could find and teach her about shapes, or polygons to be exact.

DD1 already had a basic idea of shapes as I had made her a shapes book but it was something she didn't really look at anymore so I had to come up with a more creative way to reinforce what I have already taught her, but I had to remind myself what a polygon was and what was not a polygon as it has been while since I had done any geometry. So for those of you who want to know it is a shape with straight sides which all join up.

So I cut up a whole heap of shapes, trapezoids right angle triangles Isoceles triangles, squares, quadrilatrials, trapezoids, pentagons, hexagons, heptagons and octogons. I have not done nonagons, decagons and dodecagons yet mainly because I need to print some pictures first so I can have an accurate shape :) My cutting skills at times can leave much to be desired. haha.

I wrote on the back what each shape was and as DD1 was putting glue on the back of each shape she picked up I would read and point to the words on the back and then let her glue the shape down and decorate it which ever way she wanted. DD1 really enjoyed it and we made many 'creations' with the shapes and she still asks to do crafts with shapes.I also wrote under each shape what it was and we had a ball making and doing our creation.

  I wanted to write about this so you know that there are many ways to teach different subjects and you as the parent/teacher are not stuck to any 'one way' only the way that suits your child and their needs. Make it fun and your child will continue to love learning for a very long time.

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