Today for Time to Read Tuesday, I chose to read two shape books followed by some play with different types of shapes. This activity was a blend of my love of reading and my love of math. It’s exciting to be working with Buddy already on a math topic.
I started by reading the book Paris: A Book of Shapes, which is part of the Hello World series. (I highly recommend it! Each book takes place in a different city and focuses on a different topic.) When I planned out this activity, I originally just was going to read one book. Yesterday, though, I found another book on shapes at the library (Louis the Lion Shapes), so we read that book too. While we read each book, we spent a long time looking at the pictures and finding each shape.
After reading, I gave Buddy a bag of Attribute Links as well as his shape sorter block toy to play with. The Attribute Links were given to me as part of one of my college courses, but because I’ve only taught middle school math, I’ve never used them. Buddy was very interested in the links because they were new to him. We picked out squares first. I turned the pages of both books to the square pages, and then we made a pile of squares. I linked a bunch of the squares together, which Buddy loved.
We continued to look at one shape at a time with both the blocks and the links. For each shape, I referred back to the book pages and placed the shapes on top of the picture. Buddy was able to pick out the circles on his own, but he needed help with the other ones.
Buddy enjoyed putting both the links and the blocks in and out of the bucket. He did better than with the actual shape sorter on the top of the bucket than he has in the past. Maybe the extra practice looking at the shapes and the books has helped him figure out what holes to use. (Or maybe he was just having a lucky day.)
Overall, Buddy enjoyed both books and both sets of shape toys. It was a lot of fun for me finding something in my classroom that could be used as an educational toy for my son. I’m sure we’ll be playing with both shape toys again soon.
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