SMMARTideas

SMMART ART: Felt or Paper Shape Art

(Color and Shape Recognition)

You can use either colored pieces of felt, cardstock or construction paper for this activity. You may wish to use a full piece of felt or cardstock as a canvas background to build on.

Many rudimentary drawings begin as simple shapes connected together to form a picture. The shapes are the backbone of the artwork. (Circles, Semi-circles, Squares, Triangles, Ovals, Rhombus, Rectangles, Crescents...)

(Your child can draw little faces onto the people in the bus with a marker-cut out some felt hair and an eyeball to get really fancy.)

This activity engages your child in working with shapes and colors. Your child will be placing shapes together to form familiar pictures. Ask your child about the shape names and colors as he creates.

Cut out simple shapes that your child can lay onto each other to create a familiar picture. For example you could cut out a red circle and a long, thin brown rectangle to create a lollipop picture. You could cut out a yellow circle and little triangles to place around the circle to create a sun picture.


Organize each picture in a separate plastic bag. You can draw a simple example picture of the shape art to keep with the shapes in the bag. You could even snap a photo of the shape art and keep that with the shapes as reference.

If there are several repetitive shapes, you can use these to practice addition and subtraction. For example, you can count the number of triangles in the sun picture or the number of petals on a flower, then take one away as you ask your child: “5 minus 1 equals, how many petals?” Be sure to use correct math language as you work on math skills.

Cut out several random shapes from all different colors of paper or felt. Keep these in a separate bag and let your child layer these shapes to build his own shape creations.

As an aside, for even more felt fun-you can create felt "paper" dolls with clothes and accessories to dress the doll...felt food that your child can arrange onto a felt plate...or check out this flower power ring activity: http://thislittleproject.blogspot.com/2009/04/make-some-flower-power.html

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If you would like the patterns for some of these projects, please e-mail me at SMMARTideas@hotmail.com and I'll be pleased to send them to you!

Lisa