Tracing Shapes: A Simple Preschool Activity

I set up this simple little tracing activity one afternoon for my daughter.

It's a little tricky for small hands and it took a little bit of work, but she enjoyed the activity.

Supplies needed:

White paper

Buttons (or some type of shape that is rather flat)

Pencil

Tape

Start by using a small piece of tape to tape down each button to your paper.

Then invite your child over to trace around each shape.  

Anna like to peel off each button and the piece after she was done to see her tracing...

Then as an added bonus, have them try to identify the shape they traced and color it the same color as the button.

After they have colored all the shapes, you can play a little matching game to match up the buttons and the tracings.

Overall, it's a simple activity, but great for fine motor development and pre-writing skills!!

Contact Paper Fun

This is a super fun idea that will keep your kids busy for hours and days!!  

I put up this contact paper "frame" one morning before the kids got up and stuck on some of our foam shapes.  As soon as they walked downstairs and saw it, they smiled, laughed and immediately starting taking the foam shapes on and off.  Both my kiddos (3 years and 17 months) played with this for hours on the first day.  The contact paper is great for sensory play.  The foam shapes easily stuck to the paper, but were also easy to remove and re-stick.

Lots of sorting....

The next morning, I decided to switch out our foam shapes for some foam sea animals we have.   Again....they both were so excited to see the sea creatures and jumped right in and played away for a while.

Sweet Girl would sort them by animal and Little Man would knock them all off for her to do again.

And then next came the letters.....

Sweet Girl really enjoyed these and we practiced spelling our names and some simple words.  I only put up about 10 or so, so not to overwhelm her with choices.

Contact paper is super fun!!  And also mess free...my favorite!

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Playing with Shapes

This is a fun activity to do with preschoolers.  We tried this the other day and I was really impressed with Sweet Girl's concentration and focus.

Start by cutting out shapes from foam sticker sheets.  Be sure to cut two of each shape.  Then assemble one of your shape pictures and gather the remaining pieces together so you will know which stickers go with which picture.

When you are all done, invite your preschooler over and tell them you want them to try to copy your design using the stickers.

Sweet Girl did a really good job.  I did have to help her once when she was putting the person together.  She wanted to put the legs on first, but wasn't sure where they should go since she hadn't added the body yet.  I encouraged her to add the body first and then she was able to finish it easy peasy!

Enjoy!!