Shape Hop-Scotch

After we read "Mouse Shapes", I thought it would be fun to keep talking about shapes in different ways.  (Plus, my friend Jane is trying to put together little at-home preschool units for her 3-year-old daughter, and I told her I would put together a few shape-related activities for her to copy).  So, when Amelia wanted to play with chalk outside, I invented Shape Hopscotch.  I drew all kinds of shapes on our sidewalk in every color chalk we had - circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, parallelograms, trapezoids, diamonds, crescents, hexagons, octagons, half-circles, hearts and stars.  I drew the triangles in different orientations, and made different types of rectangles.  Next time, I will draw arrows pointing left and right so we can practice those, too.

The rules are easy.  Amelia starts at one end of the board, and I tell her what to hop to, like "blue square".  Sometimes I make her do tiny little hops, and sometimes great big hops.  She likes the great big hops best.  Sometimes I even try to trick her by making her jump behind herself, but she's a clever girl and always figures it out.  We played this with energy and enthusiasm quite a few times, until it got cold and rainy.  Boo.

I don't have a single photo of her looking at the camera, but here you can see how high she can jump:

Kim did an activity like this at the same time, but she made her shapes farther apart and added actions other than hopping.  So, she might say "Gallop to the red circle".  Great idea, Kim!  I am totally stealing that next time it is warm enough to play with chalk sometime next May.