I am often asked “How do you teach concepts like shapes, colors, letters and numbers in the classroom without making the process a structured sit and listen lesson?” As you can see from my last post titled Sponge Block Water Play Puzzles, that the opportunity to explore basic concepts can be integrated into everyday playful and creative experiences. In today’s post, I am sharing an opportunity to explore shapes and color through a more artsy experience…
For this experience in exploring shapes, I cut up a handful of super absorbent paper towels (Bounty works well) into different basic shapes and set them out with art paper, scissors, glue, colored water, and droppers…
The idea was for the children to select the shapes they wanted to use, glue them to their art paper first, and then add color to the shapes. However, the children made other decisions on how they wished to approach this process. This little guy decided to start off cutting the art paper. He took his time cutting out his own shapes before trying the rest of the process…
And another little guy decided to make marks on his shapes before adding any color…
And most of the children decided it wasn’t all that necessary to glue the paper towel shapes to the art paper so we pretty much skipped that step entirely…
Instead, the process involved many more skills than I had planned to focus on. The children focused on cutting, drawing, coloring, and exploring shapes…
The children enjoyed adding color to their paper towel shapes and watching the colors absorb and blend together on each paper towel shape…
The children also noticed that if they didn’t want the colored water to “run off the shape and down the page” they needed to hold their paper flat when they moved it from the table to the drying rack…
As the children explored the process, they often would talk about what they needed or discovered along the way. “Look I have a yellow square now!” or “I need a rectangle please!”. The opportunity to explore shapes through the children’s artwork naturally gave us the opportunity to remember the names of each shape and to say the names of each shape as the children focused on the process…
While the paper towel shapes were being tested for how much colored water they could possibly hold, the children were absorbing information about shapes, color, color mixing, water transfer as well as exploring cutting and drawing skills all wrapped up in this one simple artful experience…
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