Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Toddler Time - Making Patterns and Pictures with Shapes




These little beauties have been some of my best friends lately. My 2-year old loves to play with them. And the best news of all is that I found them in the dollar bins at Target. They are basically inch-long multi-colored shapes that come with multi-colored shoelace strings. My little girl does like to thread the shapes onto the strings (although I had to wrap tape around the top of the shoelaces a few times so that it was easier for her to get the shoelace through the holes). But I wanted to find different ways to use them. So I decided to make some basic pictures using the shapes that she could then use as patterns. I laminated the pictures I made and now she can play with them by putting the correct colored shape onto the corresponding one in the pictures. 

Below are some examples of the patterns I came up with. (Important reminder: I am NOT an artist or graphic designer nor did I spend much time creating these. I usually leave the crafty blog posts to my very talented sisters and mother. So don't expect amazing. I just wanted to give you examples of things you could do--and yours will probably turn out a lot better than mine. Luckily, my 2-year old can't see my artistic deficiencies....yet.)







My 2-year old has been having a lot of fun with these. She likes to put the wooden shapes onto the patterns and she likes to make pictures of her own by putting the shapes on blank white pieces of paper.

Another fun thing to do is string some of the blocks onto one of the shoelaces into a pattern: i.e. yellow star, blue circle, green star, red circle, blue star... and then have your child choose what shape should come next. Then they can recreate the pattern on their own shoelace.

Anywho, just wanted to share some fun we have been having at our house these last few weeks. There are similar things like this that you can buy, but they cost $15 or more...which isn't a ton, but I made mine for $3. So go find some jumbo lacing beads in the dollar bins and have some fun!






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