Toddler Fun with Shapes and Colors

I love it when fun activities come together by accident.  It's easy to do when you surround yourself with awesome tools right at your fingertips.  Mother Goose Time has been providing us with two sets of manipulatives every month for over a year now, maybe 2.  So that's a lot of learning tools to work with. 

The boys were all at the table with water colors painting when I got out May's shape manipulative from Mother Goose Time - linking shapes.

I laid a yellow triangle on Adam's paper, borrowed his brush and painted the inside of the triangle with yellow paint.  Then I handed him back the paint brush and let him play a bit.  He didn't necessarily match the color paint to the color of link but he did enjoy setting it down and painting inside.

Big brother noticed the shape moving around so jumped in to help.  

I thought it was incredibly kind of Lachlan to help his brother.  But I did ask him to let Adam do it on his own.  I just couldn't pass up the opportunity for Adam work on his problem solving skills AND the chance to develop the physical ability to do two things at once with his hands. 

He mostly let the shape move around as he colored inside of it, but that's okay.  It was his choice to make.

He kept grabbing shapes out of the bag and I would name their color as he did so.  I could have also named their shape, it could have gone either way.

Once he set them out I would ask him to paint inside the ________ one.  Each time naming a different color and pointing to a link of that color if he needed a bit of help. 

 It was an awesome accidental activity.  We might just do it again.

The coolest part is that Peter joined in and he adapted it to his abilities.  He of course knows his colors and shapes, so he took the shapes and put them together to make a picture.  He used rectangles to make the arms, legs  and abdomen of a person.  He used a circle to make the head.  He made sure to match the paint to the link.

 Pretty darn cool!

I remember a few years ago Lachlan really wanted to draw a truck, but he was getting so frustrated, he just couldn't get it right.  I sat with him and helped him break down the shapes with in the object - like circles for tires and rectangles for truck beds.  It was the break through he needed and since then he has been a drawing machine.  It was pretty neat to see Peter use a new tool for this process.

I am so thankful that we have our classroom supplies all with in reach.  Sometimes, I get a little frustrated that my home looks like a school, but most of the time I am thankful that we have a well stocked school room that leads us into accidental activities such as this one.  Mother Goose Time has provided us with manipulatives I would have never thought of buying myself, some manipulatives you actually can't buy yourself because MGT has had them custom made.  I had no idea the world of possibilities that open up when these colorful tools come out to play.