The travel friendly Little Wise Box of Maths explores shapes, distances and sizes, amongst many other areas. It includes a range of tabs and images that children can use to help them learn. Here are some other ideas for exploring these areas using day-to-day items you’ll find at home or when you are out and about.
– Go on a treasure hunt to find as many objects of one shape you can around the house, and then sort the objects into different shape piles.
– Create different shapes using coins and other items you have lying around. Make large versions, smaller versions, and look at how close or far away the shapes are from each other.
– Cut out different shapes from a piece of paper and decorate each one in different ways with glue and paper, pens, pencils and paints.
– Find objects that you can paint one side of and stamp shapes lines onto paper (such as the end of a toilet roll or a pot lid).
– Play ‘eye spy the shape square (etc)’ when walking down the street and the other person has to spot as many things as they can of the chosen shape.
– Hide lots of different shaped items in a container with shredded paper and play lucky dip by pulling out the different objects and naming the shape that is picked.
– Cut out different sizes of the same shape and stack them on top of each other, starting with the biggest first and then getting smaller as you go on.
