Attributes are the characteristics of a shape. What does the shape look like? What is the name of the shape? What colour is it? What size is it?
Learning about shape names, colours, and size helps your child to identify and notice the similarities and differences in the objects they see each day.
Learning the names of the shapes helps them differentiate between objects, categorize specific characteristics like colour and size, and notice patterns and details. These are all skills needed for later learning.
You can go on a nature walk and look at the shapes, colours, and sizes of the things you see. You can create play dough shapes in different colours and sizes using cookie cutters. You can look around your home and identify the many shapes you see.
When your child is comfortable naming the shapes you can draw a square, a triangle, and a circle on cards. Place the cards on the ground and ask your child to throw a beanbag onto the shape you name. By following your instructions and identifying the shape they are developing a range of thinking and classification skills needed for later problem solving exercises.
When your child throws a beanbag at a target they are developing gross motor skills and hand eye coordination helping them to gain strength and confidence in their body using their vision and muscles in unison.
On more cards you can draw different sized shapes and different coloured shapes. Gradually you can introduce more instructions to identify the correct shape, colour, and size for your child to throw their beanbag on.
“Throw your beanbag on the big red triangle.” This encourages your child to respond to multi step instructions. This helps develop receptive language - they hear what you say, understood what you’ve said, and responded appropriately to the instructions by identifying the shape, colour, and size on the card.
The attribute cards in our Preschool School Readiness pack are identifying three shapes, six colours, and two sizes.
With older children you can increase the difficulty of the cards you create. You can have more complicated shapes, different quantities, shades of colours, 2D and 3D shapes. You can make the multi step instructions more challenging, “Throw your beanbag on the three light pink small hexagons.”
