Dot to Dot Shapes -

My husband and I were never around little kids until we had our own. One of the things that surprises me the most about little kids is how much they can really comprehend at such a young age. Every single day I am completely and utterly shocked at what my oldest daughter, Molly, says or does. She LOVES learning and that makes my teacher heart oh so happy. Over the summer she did a shapes and colors summer camp so she loves finding shapes in the world. To carry on this new found love, I decided to do Dot to Dot Shapes with her. This is a fun hands-on activity that your students or children will very much enjoy. Are you looking for more shapes ideas, activities, and printables to do at home or in the classroom? If so click here.

A child's hand connecting dots on a paper with a marker

For this activity you will need paper (or butcher paper), daubers, and crayons or markers. Like most of the activities featured on A Dab of Glue Will Do, this one can easily be tailored to fit the needs and abilities of your students. First you will use the dauber to create an outline of the shapes.

For younger students that are still working on their fine motor skill development and learning their shapes, I recommend using more daubs, especially with preschool age children or older children that are struggling with forming their shapes. Students will use a marker or crayon to create their shape. This will be similar to dot-to-dot where students are literally tracing from one dot to the next. By the time they trace each dot, they will have made the given shape!

Dot to Dot Shapes is a fun hands-on activity that your students or children will very much enjoy.

As they master tracing with more dots, you can simply daub circles in the corners of the shape, leaving them to trace in between each dot, creating the given shape.

Kindergarteners like everything BIG so I always found it fun to pull out the butcher paper for their Dot to Dot Shapes. You can make their shapes a lot bigger. For this activity, I always placed my students into committees and then had each committee complete a set of shapes. You can either daub the corners of each shape and then have students complete the shapes accordingly or have students complete everything on their own.

I think it is fun to have some papers already made with dauber shapes on them and play a guessing game with the students – similar to flashcards. Show students a shape like the one below and have them guess which shape they think it is. This is a great way to talk about corners, sides, round lines, and/or curved lines. It encourages a great classroom discussion about shapes.

For an extension of this activity, you can have students go through magazines and cut out various shapes and glue in the shapes that they just created. I always loved taping these to the ceiling of the classroom for a few weeks. Students love seeing their hard work on display and what better place than on the ceiling for them to be admired throughout the school day.