Owl Shapes

More owls! After our paper tube owls, I had the idea of letting A create an owl of her own out of paper shapes. Like all good ideas in this digital age, someone had it before me. I found this adorable template online and got to work.

It's been a while since we last reviewed shapes, but A did a great job naming the circles, ovals, and triangles. To create the owl we worked on "big" and "little" to choose the right sized shape for each part. Then she glued the whole thing to another toilet paper tube. (Yes, apparently we go through a LOT of toilet paper around here.)

Wow! Said the Owl by Tim Hopgood

This isn't a book about shapes, but it covers colors and is cute to boot! One little owl stays up way past her bedtime to discover all the amazing colors that come out during the day. Each collage-illustration features simple but vibrant scenes of each new color. In the end the little owl decides the starry sky is most beautiful of all. Fun, cute, and perfect for reviewing colors with your toddler!

Check out these other shape activities and corresponding books!

Monsters! Monster Shapes

We're getting a lot of mileage out of our googly eyes this week. To make these cute (and oh so educational) shape monsters, all we needed was craft foam shapes, googly eyes, and lots and lots of glue.

A is never happier than when she's squeezing glue out onto something in copious amounts. Googly eyes were just a nice bonus.

With this one little activity we worked on our fine motor control, discussed the shapes and colors of the monsters, counted each of their eyes and talked about which eyes were bigger and smaller. Not bad for 50 cents worth of craft materials!

Go Away, Big Green Monster! by Ed Emberley

The Emberleys have a whole series of monster books out, but this was the one I could get my hands on. I'm so glad I did! Ingenious die cutting on each page makes this book such fun to read. As you turn each page a monster slowly appears, revealing his big yellow eyes and sharp white teeth through the die cuts on the page. Half way through the book you yell "You don't scare me!" and the subsequent pages hide each of the features until he's disappeared.

I fell in love with The Very Hungry Caterpillar at age 4 because of the die cuts in the book. I can only imagine how much I would have loved this one. My girls certainly do!

I'm linking up to:
- Play Academy @ Nurture Store
- Show & Tell @ ABC & 123
- Tot Tuesday @ My Delicious Ambiguity

Shape Train

Our theme this week is TRAINS! Those of you with little boys would probably be happy if you never saw another toy train - let alone another episode of Thomas or Dinosaur Train - again. But I have girls and while we are drowning in princesses, trains are a rare treat.

This simple train craft is easy to make and reinforces both shapes and color recognition. Simply grab what you already have on-hand: a few sheets of construction paper, scissors, and God's gift to teachers and moms everywhere: a glue stick.

My glue-obsessed girls did a great job building their trains from three rectangles, one square, one triangle, and seven circles.

Of course, that's not the only thing A glued...

and no project of hers is complete without first being turned upside down, scribbled upon, and then torn apart.

My eldest independent-thinker used extra scraps to turn hers into a bustling train, puffing smoke as it races along.

Freight Train by Donald Crews

This Caldecott honor book is perfect for teaching colors to train-loving toddlers. The sparse text on each page describe one of the train cars: "Green cattle car," "blue gondola car," etc. The illustrations are simple, utilizing only six basic colors and shades of black.

This is a great one to buy as a board book for babies and younger toddlers. There are also Spanish editions, for those of you who wish to introduce a new language to your little ones.

I'm linking up to:
- Show & Tell at ABC & 123
- stART @ A Mommy's Adventures

Mouse Shapes

If mice can teach colors, why not shapes? In her book Mouse Shapes, Ellen Stoll Walsh covers basic shapes while spinning a delightful story of three mice and their struggles to avoid a cat. In the book, the three mice discover a pile of shapes and use them to build all sorts of different objects, eventually creating three huge mice to scare away the scaredy-cat.

For our craft I pulled out our trusty construction paper and cut out seven circles and one triangle to make some giant mice of our own.

What is it about glue? Both girls would have been content all day smearing glue onto the shapes.

Other than the ridiculously disproportionate ears, their mice turned out great. We drew on the limbs and tail with a magic marker and I printed off a poem for the inside of the card.

Mice - by Rose Fyleman

I think mice
are rather nice.
Their tails are long,
Their faces small,
They haven't any
Chins at all.

Their ears are pink,
Their teeth are white.
They run around
The house at night.

They nibble things
They shouldn't touch
And no one seems
To like them much.

But I think mice
are nice. 

So do we... at least when safely confined within the pages of a good book!

I'm linking up to:
- stART @ A Mommy's Adventures

We're back with a book for boats

We're back from the Great Page Road Trip of 2010 and I have vowed never to go on a vacation with a toddler again. Strange places, an uncomfortable pack-n-play, and a complete deviation from our normal schedule and diet transformed my sweet toddler into Jack Jack from The Incredibles. I seriously wouldn't have been surprised had she turned into a ball of fire.

In between the meltdowns and tantrums, we did manage to enjoy the trip. One of our favorite experiences was riding the Cape May - Lewes Ferry.

The ferry connects Cape May, NJ with Lewes, DE. Not only the girls, but my husband and I thought it was great to be able to drive our car right onto the boat, park, and enjoy an hour cruise. The ferry supplied coloring books and crayons to the girls, so when they weren't terrifying me by running along the deck, they could sit and color.

I (of course) checked out their gift shop for kids books but didn't see any boat-themed books I liked as much as:

Ship Shapes by Stella Blackstone

This book is perfect for 2-3 year olds who are learning their shapes and colors. The illustrations are fantastic fabric collages filled with colors, patterns, and textures that seem to pop off the page. The story is straightforward: two kids and a dalmatian set sail and meet up with many strange and wonderful creatures, all the while asking the reader to find and count the different shapes on the page. The rhyming and repetition is just right for little ones, although even your kindergartners will be entertained by finding and counting all the shapes. Heck, I was entertained!



Activities:

 Make these adorable Fruit Sailboats over at The Stories of A to Z (aka my sister!)

Print out this easy B is for boat printable and let your kids cut and color the different shapes.

Create this cute seashell sail boat with a few simple materials from Family Fun.