School Ideas: Foam Shapes

I bought a pack of colored foam squares from Dollar Tree with no idea as to their intended use - but just recently I discovered what they were for!  Charissa is learning shapes, colors and patterns this year.  I cut 3 squares, 3 circles and 3 triangles from blue, yellow & orange foam.  She loves playing with her shapes!

Here, I asked her to sort them according to shape.

And now, according to color!  

She's always so proud when she gets them right :-)

I printed off some free worksheets from The Kid's Learning Station for her to practice drawing shapes.  While she is very good with discerning the shape and color, she hasn't quite developed the fine motor skills needed to draw them accurately.  So while working on her tracing/drawing skills with the worksheets, she can still do patterns using her foam shapes instead of struggling with the fill in the blank worksheet.

First, I make a pattern (below) and then I give her three shapes (above) to choose from to complete the pattern. 

 She chooses the shape...

...and completes the pattern!

The choices can be made more difficult by having all the same shape of different colors, or all the same color in different shapes (did that make sense?  I feel confused...).  Eventually, I plan to start making patterns using three different shapes/colors but for now, two do just fine.

This was such an easy and cheap learning tool!  I used the shapes from the Kid's Learning Station worksheets as my template.