What You Need

Floor Space

Masking Tape

What To Do

Adult Preparation - Use masking tape to create a large shape on the floor. This is a wonderful tool for shape recognition and can be used to emphasize the shape of the week or shape of the month.

Squares are an easy shape to start with but you could also do triangles, rectangles, diamonds, or starts. With a little ingenuity you can create ovals and circles, although these are a bit more difficult.

Preschooler Preparation – This activity can be done as part of a circle time routine or as a music and movement activity. Introduce the shape that you have chosen to the preschoolers. Have each preschooler look around the room and find an object that is the same shape. Let the preschoolers walk around the shape and explore it. Have them describe to you what the shape looks like, how many sides it has, and what other objects are the same shape.

Preschool Games to Play

Follow the Leader

Have the preschool class stand in a line and walk around the shape on the masking tape. Let the first preschooler in the line decide what the other preschoolers are going to do. Preschoolers could walk, hop, dance, wiggle or crawl around the shape.

Dance Around the Shape

Play some upbeat music as preschoolers walk in a line around the shape. Tell preschoolers to keep walking as long as the music is playing but as soon as they hear the music stop they should sit down on the shape.

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Helpful Tips for Parents

• Choose toys that grow with the child: open-ended materials (blocks, clay, art supplies) remain valuable for years; single-use toys with one correct answer produce brief engagement.

• Children's questions are assessment data. The questions a child asks reveal their current conceptual level and what they're ready to learn next.

• Avoid academic pressure before age 5. Preschool children's brains are not developmentally ready for formal academic instruction, and premature pressure backfires.

• Use mathematical language all day: "more than," "less than," "half," "equal," "twice as much." Incidental math vocabulary builds the conceptual foundation formal math builds on.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much learning time should a preschooler have per day?

All of it — because preschoolers learn continuously through every interaction with their environment. The question of "learning time" implies that learning is separate from living, which it isn't at this age. A preschooler who plays freely, has rich conversations, is read to, helps in the kitchen, plays outdoors, and is exposed to music and art is having the richest possible educational experience. Formal, scheduled "learning time" is less productive than a generally enriched daily environment.

How do I know if my preschooler is learning enough at home?

Developmental milestones (not academic benchmarks) are the appropriate assessment tool for preschoolers. Verify your child is meeting age-appropriate milestones for language, motor, social-emotional, and cognitive development using your pediatrician's well-child visit assessments. Preschoolers learning through play, conversation, books, and daily life engagement are learning more than their standardized test scores will later reflect. Concern is warranted if a child shows regression in skills previously mastered, or fails to meet speech and language milestones.

Related reading: See also our alphabet activities and our read-aloud guide for more ideas on this topic.

🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop

• 🔢 Early Numeracy — Hands-on counting, sorting, measuring, and pattern work develops the number sense and mathematical reasoning that formal arithmetic will later build on — and preschool numeracy is one of the strongest predictors of later math achievement.
• 📖 Story Structure Understanding — Understanding that stories have a beginning, problem, solution, and ending develops narrative comprehension — the mental schema children use to make sense of increasingly complex texts throughout their school years.
• 📚 Pre-Reading Skills — Activities that involve letters, sounds, rhymes, and print directly build the phonological awareness and letter knowledge that are the two strongest predictors of successful reading development.
• 👂 Listening & Attention — Activities that require children to listen carefully and follow directions build the voluntary auditory attention that classroom learning, reading comprehension, and conversation all require.

Preschoolers will love this active play activity and they will learn to recognize their shapes at the same time. This makes a wonderful circle time activity and can be used to emphasize any shape that preschoolers are learning.

Questions to Ask Your Child

Use these open-ended prompts to extend the learning during or after the activity:

• "What was the most interesting thing you learned today?"
• "Can you explain this to a stuffed animal as if they've never heard of it?"
• "What part do you want to practice more?"
• "How is this connected to something you already know?"
• "What would you want to learn more about?"
• "If you were the teacher, what would you tell the class about this?"

There are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions. The goal is to keep the conversation going, model curious thinking, and give your child practice putting their experience into words.