The most fun you'll have with construction paper

Don't you love when the simplest of activities turns into hours of fun? That's what happened here today. I had planned to save this for the weekly wrap up, but we had so much fun with it I thought it deserved a post all its own.

As part of our art focus, we read I Spy Shapes in Art together.

My kids LOVE I Spy so this book was a big hit with them.

For a quick, fun game I cut out shapes from construction paper in different colors (if I were to do this again I would use craft foam instead for durability). I made circles, ovals, squares, rectangles and triangles. Next, I had the kids lay them out on the floor in a random pattern.

(Please excuse the dim pictures - it was a very dark and rainy day today!)

For the first game, we used Chaos's stomp rockets as "shape rockets." I called out a shape and the kids took turns trying to throw or stomp the rockets to the right shape.

Though I started by calling out shapes, we did eventually move to colors and then, for the hardest round, to shapes AND colors.

Extensions of this game

• Add additional shapes for difficulty
• Draw letters or numbers on the shapes and alternate calling out shapes, colors, numbers or letters
  
• Add letters to the shapes and call out a word. Have the child throw the rocket to letter the word starts with
• Add numbers to the shapes. For older kids, give a simple math problem and have them throw the rocket to the correct answer

When the kids were done launching rockets, I switched up the game. I had them go on a Shape Scavenger Hunt. They had to search the house and bring back items to match each of the shapes on the floor.

I loved how creative they got with this. The green tray in the above picture had a triangle shape on it so they deemed it a triangle shape instead of a rectangle (the shape of the tray). We also played this game with colors.

Extensions on this game

• Add numbers to the shapes. Ask the kids to find like items to match the numbers (3 blocks on the number three, 4 puzzle pieces on the the number four, etc)
• Add letters to the shapes. Have the child find items that start with that letter.
  

Finally, when we were cleaning up, Pinky discovered that she could rearrange the shapes to make pictures. She spent a lot of time (and thought) arranging the shapes into new works of art.


Extensions of this game

• Challenge the child to make a specific object (house, person, butterfly, etc)
• Play "guess the picture" - one person creates a picture and the others have to guess what it is
• Attempt to imitate some of the art in the book or in pictures around the house

Other Game Ideas

• Play your own version of Hullabaloo. Have the kids start on a certain color, then ask them to spin, crawl, walk, silly dance, etc to another shape or color (or letter or number).
• Have the kids sort by matching shapes, then by matching colors

What ideas can you come up with for these simple shapes?

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