Teach your toddler shapes

Your toddler may not be able to read or count yet but there are still plenty of things to keep them engaged. And a great place to start is by teaching them to recognize different shapes. Shapes are everywhere and with TinyTap it’s simple to turn shapes into a game which is not only fun but highly educational.
 

If you’re looking to teach your toddler about shapes, see our game creation tips below. You’ll soon see how easy it is. With this game, your toddler will begin to not only recognize shapes but also how they can be combined in different ways to form objects.
 
1. Pick your shapes

We recommend starting with a few simple shapes. You don’t want to make it too complicated or your little one may lose interest. For our exercise, we used a circle, square, rectangle and triangle. These are the most commonly used shapes and they can be combined to form other shapes and objects.

2. Introduce the shapes
 
If your toddler is already familiar with shapes you can skip this. If not, you may want to spend some time introducing the different shapes. For this game, your toddler needs to know the name of all the shapes being used.

3. Create the game
 
It’s best to start the game off simple and gradually increase the difficulty. For example, the first few pages of the game could include all the shapes and ask the toddler to tap on just one of them. You can repeat this in subsequent pages until all the shapes have been found. So the first page may as the toddler to find the circle; the next the square and so on until all the shapes have been found.

You can then be more creative. Think of basic objects and of all the different shapes that make them up. It’s important that you stick to the initial set of shapes introduced. You would then ask the toddler to tap on one of the shapes. See the examples below (all of which were created using TinyTap Artist).
 
Tap on the triangle

Tap on the circle

Tap on the square

Keep in mind that while we did create this exercise with toddlers in mind, if you want to reinforce an older child’s ability to perceive different shapes you can get them to create their own TinyTap shape-themed game. You could also combine such an exercise with a lesson that teaches adjectives. For example, you could ask your child to tap on the big red circle. This makes the game more challenging and better suited to the level of an older child.