PeeWees: The Shape of Me and Other Stuff (week 1)

From PeeWee mom Julia...

The book today was "The Shape of Me" by Dr. Seuss. It's not much of a story, but rather a couple kids thinking about themselves, their bodies' shapes, and the shapes of other things. After considering all different shapes: "smoke, marshmallows, and fires; mountains, roosters, horses, and tires!" they ultimately conclude, "Of all the shapes we might have been, I say 'Hooray!' for the shapes we're in!"

 

It is not too long and the pictures actually kept the kids fairly engaged through both readings of the book. I was lousy at taking pictures, but we had a really fun day looking at and for shapes all around us.

 

Open Play - We started with shaped lacing cards, foam shape puzzles and shape sorters. There was enough to switch off but not enough for each kid to be doing the same thing all the time. Of the lacing cards, the octagon was the most popular and nearly everyone laced that one. I had two sorters going, one that was much for difficult than the other and they all persevered really well and stuck with them until the end. Their attention spans have improved dramatically!

 

 

 

 

 

Circle Time - We then got down to business at circle time, singing our song and counting out shapes from my "shape bag"-- an assortment of items from around the house I'd pulled together. They took turns pulling out different objects and telling us what shape they had. Squares and rectangles stumped them all at first but by the end they were getting them right 90% of the time. Their counting is also getting so much better. 14 was the stumbling block today but they improved on a second try and made it to 20 (as a group, not necessarily as individuals :).

 

Then we read the book and looked around the room for shapes, playing a quick game of "I spy...." 

 

Snack -  square saltines, rectangle mini wheats, oval jelly beans, and circle cucumber slices. Everyone ate everything and liked pointing out the shapes.

 

 

Art: While I traced each kid's "shape" (the outline of their body on poster paper), they practiced tracing shapes. Although most of them did not finish the whole paper, I was impressed by how hard they tried for at least one or two of the shapes. This was not easy for them but they made a decent effort.

 

Activity 1 - While they did this I showed them "the many shapes of chewing gum" (a page of the book)-- as it comes out of the wrapper, as it is chewed, as I blew bubbles, etc. They were highly amused. I asked them before I put it in my mouth if it would stay like a rectangle in my mouth and they were all stumped!

 

Activity 2 - Then we played a shape game with some shape cards I have. A little shape sorter spits out a shape when you pull a lever and a shape comes out. If you have that shape on your card (there are more shapes than spaces on each card), then you keep it and cover it. If not, you put it back. They all filled their cards successfully and liked this game.

 

Activity 3 - Because it was such warm weather I decided we needed to go outside for the last 20 minutes rather than play our second game, which I'll save for next week. Before spending the last 15 minutes on the trampoline and in the sandbox, we went on a shape hunt on my street. We saw lots of rectangles on the houses and bricks, circle pipes and tires, a diamond-shaped street sign and an octagon stop sign at the end of the street, and square concrete blocks. They liked shouting out the shape names and got them right almost every time. They did such a good job holding hands and listening in the street; I was so impressed.

 

Closing - We finished on the trampoline (which is a big circle) and sang our good-bye chant there. It was a good, fun day.