We’re going on a shape hunt!
Once you start its easy to see the natural shapes that occur all around us.
This is a beginners exercise to see how many you can find
We started by familiarizing ourselves with some shapes by painting onto stones so we knew what we were looking for. Then we cut the shapes from coloured card to take with us. there are templates of shapes. This can be done with so many age groups so tailor it to suit your needs.
We started with a circle, triangle, pentagon, 5 pointed and 6 pointed star. these are all good ones to begin with and appear quite a lot in nature around us.
Once out walking (we went to the woods) we used the shapes to match to those we found around us.
It’s a looking exercise really, learning to train the eye, to see the geometry of whats around us and always there.
But once you get it, you see them everywhere and the children pick it up too.
There they are, bold flowers proud as punch or small weeds hidden away. Tucked away in the smallest corners are perfect triangles as ivy leaves or a cluster of circles nestled at the foot of a tree trunk.
As has been the tradition of this ‘winter that never ends’, we didn’t stay outside too long and brought a few collected items inside to examine and give them our full attention.
Also the kids had wondered off at this point and were climbing trees, a much more vigorous and therefore warmer exercise! I was still hooked though, looking everywhere.
after a while I found that what helped was to be able to look at the leaf or flower through a shape drawn on acetate, as that demonstrated clearly the similarity rather than fingers and gloves getting in the way.
go to the printables page for the shapes to trace onto acetate.
It really is about training your eye, and the eyes of the children around you. Once you start to see them you can’t stop. Now, I just keep seeing shapes everywhere.
so the snail is not one of the shapes we’d looked at before, it’s a spiral and we’ll come back to that later as there are lots of geometry to explore in spirals, but he was just too lovely to leave out.
Happy Hunting!
Stay with us, there’s lots more Shape Hunting to do; in food, on the body and in buildings around us. sign up to follow our posts and find out more.
original content of the smarthappyproject.com
