Ship Shapes
🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 💡 Design Thinking — Imagining what a project will look like before building it, adjusting the design when it doesn't work, and refining until satisfied introduces the iterative design thinking cycle that underlies engineering, art, and innovation.
- 💪 Persistence & Resilience — Multi-step projects that take real time and encounter real obstacles build the persistence and resilience that research consistently identifies as more predictive of success than intelligence or talent.
- 🎨 Creativity & Innovation — Projects that begin with the child's own idea and end with their own creation develop creative self-efficacy — the belief that original ideas are worth pursuing and that their execution is achievable.
- 🔬 Science & Engineering — Projects that must actually function — a structure that holds weight, a boat that floats, a plant that grows — teach engineering principles through direct experience that textbook learning can't replicate.
Create ships with different shapes with your preschooler. Based on the book, Ship Shapes, preschoolers are invited to explore the environment in search of different shapes in the world around us.
What You Will Need
Shapes cut out of construction paper (be sure to include a semi-circle, crescent, diamond, oval, star, rectangle, circle, and oval)
Pictures of boats, animals, houses
How To Make It
Take out a picture of a ship
Place the shapes on top of the ship, enhancing the picture
Add a flag to the ship, use different shapes on the flag
Continue to add shapes to different pictures, discussing which shapes make up different objects
Make it More Challenging
Introduce patterns, an early math skill, while setting shapes on top of pictures. For example, a ship flag could have a triangle, square, triangle, square, ask preschooler, "what comes next?" Make patterns more difficult as preschoolers catch on to the concept.
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Helpful Tips for Parents
- Include children in the planning phase: "What do we need? How will we do it? What might go wrong?" This develops project thinking and executive function simultaneously.
- Skill-building projects (learning to tie shoes, building a birdhouse, planting a garden) develop capability and pride that decorative projects don't.
- Gift projects (making something for someone else) produce higher-quality work and more sustained effort than self-directed projects — the recipient provides motivational context.
- Connect projects to real-world problems: a birdhouse placed in the yard actually helps birds. A garden grown actually feeds the family. Real-world consequence makes projects meaningful.
- Projects that cross domains (art + science, construction + mathematics, cooking + chemistry) are the most enriching and the best preparation for the interdisciplinary thinking modern life requires.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can technology be part of a preschooler's project?
Yes — technology as a tool within a project is different from passive screen consumption. A child using a tablet to photograph their project, record a video tour of their creation, or listen to instructions is using technology as a tool within a making context. Simple stop-motion animation apps (where children photograph clay or block constructions frame by frame) are genuinely engaging project tools from age 4. Voice-recording apps allow children to narrate their project process — a form of emergent literacy. The distinction: technology as a tool within a project = productive; technology replacing the making = unproductive.
How do I keep a preschooler engaged in a multi-day project?
Multi-day project engagement depends on visible progress at the end of each session and clear anticipation for the next. End each work session at a natural stopping point where something is complete (a layer dried, a section assembled, a chapter written). Review the previous session's work at the start of each new session — reconnecting the child to their progress re-activates motivation. Display in-progress work prominently so children see it throughout the day, generating incidental revisiting and continued investment.
Related reading: See also our science experiments guide and our painting projects for more ideas on this topic.
Questions to Ask Your Child
Use these open-ended prompts to extend the learning during or after the activity:
- "What was your favorite part, and what made it special?"
- "What would you do differently next time?"
- "Can you teach me how to do the part you liked best?"
- "What did you notice while we were doing this?"
- "What does this remind you of from somewhere else in your life?"
- "If you could change one thing about this, what would it be?"
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.
