Shapes are one of my favourite sets of vocabulary to teach young and very young learners. There are so many fun ways you can work with shapes, whether that’s with Play Doh, making shapes with the student’s bodies, with fingers in the air, or one of many other exciting and interesting activities.
Last night I picked up another interesting way to teach shapes.
It involves giving the students mini whiteboards and getting them to draw the shape, whilst the mini whiteboard is sitting on their head.
There were lots of laughs, particularly when I asked the teaching assistant to draw a star during the activity demonstration. Overall, the children really enjoyed the activity. Its probably best for higher kindergarten or Starter levels, as they will have better motor skills than the beginning kindergarten students.
Update: Even though I wasn’t sure it would work, I tried this activity again with a slightly younger class of 5-6 year old students. I was quite surprised that they were all able to do reasonably well with the task. What was interesting, was that I could ‘see’ them thinking and processing what the shape looked like in their brain, as they tried to coordinate the movement with their hand. They also had fun with the activity, too.
