Geometric Matching

(26 Months)

Uncle Keith has these huge geometric volume containers.  When he brought them out, my eyes lit up.  Oh the possibilities (my geeky teacher side started coming through).  We first laid a couple of them out and watched their reactions as the sunlight passed through the container's colored base- the kids were amazed that the driveway changed color.  Little Miss kept moving her hand in and out of the light watching her hand go from skin color to green to skin color to green.  I took a few pictures but they didn't show the colors (so sad).

Here we are practicing following directions (please place the containers inside this rectangle).  It's amazing how well they follow directions when it's a game!  Although this did turn into a construction activity when the boys started stacking the containers on top of one another.  We never did say how to place the containers inside the rectangle- boys, so creative.

Next, we traced the bases of each of the containers onto the driveway with sidewalk chalk, then we asked the kids to match up the colored bases (bottoms) of the containers to the shapes in the driveway.  They really got into this, they quickly started working finding a shape and looking for the match.  I love how in the second picture, Buddy is "reading" the instructions for the geometric shapes.

The twins really liked this part of the activity so to modify it for home, I'm going to start saving empty tissue boxes, cereal boxes, plastic mayonnaise jars, plastic peanut butter jars... and we'll do this again.

We never did get around to using the geometric shapes as they were designed (to demonstrate volume), we'll try again on our next visit.  They had so much fun, just matching up shapes, looking through the bases seeing the world another color, stacking and watching the tower crash with the loud banging sounds.