A fun way to explore shapes with your students!
The bloggers of the Virtual Book Club are celebrating the works of Lois Ehlert this month and so my class has been busy reading up on a few of the beautifully illustrated books by Lois Ehlert…
Introducing a Story
The Lois Ehlert book titled, “Color Zoo” takes a creative but simple look at shapes (and colors) and how different shapes can be layered on top of each other to make an animal shape…
Expanding on the Story
After discussing all the shapes and animals in the book with the children, I then invited the children to help me sort a set of felt cut out shapes onto our flannel board graph….
Sorting and Graphing with Shapes
To create the graph, I simply used colored tape on the flannel board to create the lines of the graph. I cut out plenty of red felt squares, orange felt circles, and yellow felt triangles for the children to add to our large group graph…
Each child came up to the graph, selected one shape out of the baggie and placed the chosen shape on the graph. We talked about how the graph has three columns and each shape should be placed in its own column so we can compare the number of shapes as we go along…
The children easily caught on to the idea of keeping each shape in the correct column. The children continued to come up to the flannel board and add a new shape from our baggie of felt shapes to the flannel board graph…
Exploring Math Concepts
Throughout the process of adding shapes to the graph, we considered how many shapes were in each column and which column had the most or least number of shapes. We discovered as we kept adding more shapes to the board, the number of shapes in each column would change too…
This was our very first large group graphing experience this school year and the children did a remarkable job all throughout the process…
Creating Art with Shapes
Then the children were invited over to the art table to create their own animals from construction paper shapes…
A wonderful morning of exploring our shapes together…
Available on Amazon
Up and coming authors that will be shared in the Virtual Book Club include the following…
- October 15th-Amy Krouse Rosenthal
- November 19th- Tomie de Paola
- December 17th- Jan Brett
- January 21st-David McPhail
- February 18th-Dr. Seuss
- March 18th-Julia Donaldson
- April 15th-David Shannon
- May 20th-Leo Lionni
- June 17th-Gail Gibbons
- July 15th- Jez Alborough
- August 19th-Donald Crews
To see more ideas from the other participating Virtual Book Club just check out the linky below! Remember, if you are viewing this post by email or in a RSS Reader, you may need to click on the title of this post to view the linky from the blog post…
Participating Bloggers
Toddler Approved, Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas, Rainy Day Mum, Reading Confetti, Inspiration Laboratories, Play Dr. Mom, Mommy and Me Book Club, Kitchen Counter Chronicles, Two Big Two Little, Creative Connections for Kids, The Golden Gleam, Juggling with Kids, Taming the Goblin, Crafty Moms Share, Ready Set Read 2 Me, Famiglia and Seoul, The Good Long Road, The Educator’s Spin On It, Imagination Soup, 3 Dinosaurs, Royal Baloo, Being A ConsciousParent, No Twiddle Twaddle, Crayon Freckles, The Pleasantest Thing, Adventures in Reading with Kids, Smile, Play, Learn, Creekside Learning, Our Feminist Playschool, and Teach Preschool!
Lois Ehlert Virtual Book Club Linky
- Link up only posts inspired by Lois Ehlert that share children’s book inspired crafts, activities, recipes, etc. Any other posts will be deleted.
- Visit other blog posts on the linky and comment on or share the ones you love!
- Add our Virtual Book Club button to your post if you’d like.