Hello everyone!  Today I thought I’d share a fun geometry activity that we did yesterday; it was easy to set up and clean up and was a good exercise in building geometric concepts and vocabulary as well as number recognition.

Geometric Mural-Making:  (painters tape, dice, scissors, a blank wall)

My kids and I decided to create a mural composed of lines of painters’ tape to “decorate” our house.  Because I’m a teacher and hoard art supplies, we used rainbow colored painters’ tape; you can totally do this with regular, blue painters’ tape.  We used the large, white rectangular space underneath our kitchen island for our mural but any space that’s blank and low down works perfectly.

Set Up:  The kids and I cut tape strips of different lengths and I hung them off the edge of the kitchen counter where the kids could reach them but they wouldn’t get tangled.

I then used tape to outline a large rectangular space.  This rectangle will be your picture frame- all tape strips must be placed inside of it- which will help your child to reason spatially in the game and will also keep the mural from being all over your house.

Game:  

  • Introduce the words vertical, horizontal and diagonal to your child.  I wrote each word on an easel (see image below) and had the children move their arms to create each kind of line with their bodies as they echoed the words back to me.  Let them it’s okay if they don’t remember all of the words right away- the point of this game is to learn and practice!
  • Roll a dice to start each turn.  If you get a 1 or a 2 you can put the tape on the mural vertically.  If you get a 3 or a 4 you can put the tape on horizontally. If you get a 5 or a 6 you can put the tape on diagonally.
  • Talk ahead of time about how different people’s pieces of tape will end up touching and crossing each other and that’s okay- when you make things with other people you put your ideas together to make something beautiful that you wouldn’t have thought of by yourself.

Each time we rolled a number, we practiced reading the dots on the dice and then saying the corresponding vocabulary word as we made the line with our bodies.  Then kids picked the length and color tape that they wanted and added it to our mural.

Take time to reflect on your mural after you have created it.  My kids loved sharing what they thought it looked like and all kinds of mathematical ideas and vocabulary came up as we discussed which lines were intersecting, perpendicular or parallel.  The kids also found many shapes in the mural.  See the mural we created at the bottom!

I hope you are all hanging in there.  My heart is with you.

With my very best wishes,

Carrie