Are you getting ready to write you Shapes lesson plans? Here are two engaging shapes activities that will be a hit with your students!
1. Directed Drawing with Shapes and Positional Words
Skills:
This activity focuses on drawing geometric shapes, locating the correct positions to draw the shapes (above, below, between, inside, and under), and listening skills.
Materials:
crayons, markers, or colored pencils
teacher script and printable activity sheet (complimentary download here)
Steps:
- Distribute answer sheets to your students
- Read one direction at a time from your Teacher Script.
Tips: Before starting the activity, have your students locate the crayons they’ll need to use. They’ll need blue, red, yellow, orange, purple, and black crayons.
Steps:
Distribute answer sheets to your students
Read one direction at a time from your Teacher Script.
Integrate: This lesson integrates beautifully with a Language Arts lesson about prepositions.
Warm-up/Follow-up:
- Project the answer sheet on the board and have your students come up to draw the shapes as you read the directions. (Do it before or after the activities depending on your students’ needs)
- Have a few students be the ones reading the directions for the class.
- Have students write the color inside the shape for extra spelling practice.
2. Marshmallow Shape Building
Skills:
This activity focuses on building shapes, identifying shape attributes such as number of sides and vertices, spelling of shape names.
Materials:
- Mini marshmallows
- Toothpicks
- Large construction paper (not white)
- Labels (complimentary download here)
- Glue sticks and scissors
- Liquid glue (Elmer’s)
- Scissors
Tips:
- Before starting the activity have the marshmallows and the toothpicks placed into enough paper plates or bowls.
- Have the correct spelling of the shapes available for your students to copy.
- Model good group work behavior such as:
➜taking turns waiting until someone is done getting their materials from the plates (one hand
taking materials at a time),
➜asking someone to pass something rather than reaching across the table,
➜saying please and thank you,
➜keeping paper scraps off the floor,
➜other good habits that you’d like your students to develop.
Steps:
- Have students fold the construction paper into 4 boxes.
- Decide if you want the direction of the paper to be landscape or portrait and show kids what their papers should look like.
- Have students write their names on the top right corner.
- Have kids cut and paste the shape labels in the bottom part of each square.
- Discuss safety rules for using toothpicks.
- Show students how to build a shape.
- Give out the marshmallows and toothpicks in little containers, or paper plates.
- Have students build their own shapes or allow them to build the ones you want. (I like walking around challenging students who are ready to build trickier shapes like hexagons or trapezoids.)
- When shapes are finished, have students fill out the shape labels, and glue the marshmallows to the construction paper.
*Resources*
If you are looking for resources to support your students’ understanding of shapes, I can definitely help you with that!
I have Shapes Packets that include tons of variety for shape practice, including assessments! There are FREE SAMPLES available for each packet when you check out the product page.
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| Preview it here! |
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| Preview it here! |
If you want to keep this information fresh all year you can assign homework that constantly reviews learned skills. This is the homework I have in case you are interested. It’s 100% Common Core aligned! There is a FREE SAMPLE available for each packet when you check the resource pages.
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| 1st Grade Math Homework |
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| 2nd Grade Math Homework |
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| 3rd Grade Math Homework |