Unique Ways of Teaching Shapes to Toddlers

This month our Mother Goose Time curriculum had a lot of activities featuring shapes. Not just the typical lessons you can find on Pinterest, but truly unique exercises to have your children recognize and learn new shapes while building, creating, problem solving and having fun. What I like about Mother Goose Time is that this isn't limited to one month. Each month has new and exciting ways of teaching and learning.

Each monthly box comes with a new manipulative for the children to play with and use throughout the month. This month's was a bag of Multi-Style Tangrams in a mix of colors and sizes. These were wonderful tools to use with the lessons included in the box. Here are a few of the lessons this month that featured using these Tangrams (although you can create many more activities as well).

The first lesson was using cube cards that came in this month's box with your pocket cube that is included in your Welcome Kit. Each child took turns rolling the cube and built the image on the card.

There were fun images that the girls had to problem solve and figure out. They had to use various shapes until they decided which shapes would be best. They also enjoyed figuring out what the image was and discussing different options together.

A unique game was the Feeling Shapes Game. Along with Shapes, this month we also learned Emotions. I would have never figured out how to connect these topics on my own, but I don't have to! I love the way they connect teaching multiple topics in one activity.

With this game each child would pick a shape out of the bag, decide what the emotion was, act it out with their facial expressions and then find the shape in the Tangrams. After the found the shape, they would trace around the outside of each shape on their own piece of paper.

This exercise even sparked a good 30 minutes of tracing other things around the house like toys and supplies.

Another great activity was this pattern sheet. For this, the girls had to recognize the next shape in the pattern and even create their own!

This was a great activity to work on together especially when they got to create their own pattern. They had me solve their patterns and were very excited to "help" me figure it out.

This Feeling Puzzle Game was another great game to tie together learning shapes, patterns, puzzles and emotions.

While this was a little more difficult, Bella took her time to try and find the same shape and same color as the image and place them in the same way. This one took a lot of her concentration and helped her slow down and take her time.

When they finished their faces, they acted out the emotion they just created. Any guesses on this one?

These fun Design Mats were a great way for the kids to transition into a new subject. I would give them a mat as I gathered the next project. They enjoyed finishing each picture and saying what they were.

Last but not least was their favorite activity of the month, the "I am" Spinner Game.

They had to spin the spinner, find the shape that it landed on and place it on the game board trying to fill the board up before the spinner landed on the dog.

The girls really enjoyed celebrating when they didn't land on the dog! It was fun to see them learning to take turns, help each other and celebrate each other's victories since they were one the same team.


I will save and use all of these activities for future use. The girls and I enjoyed them and they are a great way for them to have fun and learn together!

After months of being a paying customer, I was given this month's box for free in return for my honest experiences and opinions!