Spatial Reasoning – Visualize Shapes Through Play

Instructions

1. Start with simple 2-dimensional shapes such as triangle and square. Notice how you can open up a joint, add one toothpick and one playdoh ball and you'll get another another shape.
2. Starting with a triangle, adding one more toothpick gives you a square, then a pentagon, hexagon, heptagon and octagon. If you keep adding, you'll eventually get a shape that resembles a circle!
3. Spatial language has been shown to enhance spatial reasoning. When you start building 3-dimensional structures, you can introduce words such as cube, sphere, prism, etc.
4. One advantage of constructing 3-D objects this way is that you can see through them, allowing your toddler to practice visualizing 3-D structures.
5. Here comes the edible part of this project. Experiment with different candies and fruits. Usually, the best results are structures built from Gum Drops, Gummi Bears and grapes.
6. Kids especially enjoy this part. But watch out how much candies your little one eat while working on this (fruit is ok in my opinion).
7. I recommend doing this after a meal so that at least they start with a full stomach.
8. Gum drops are great. They are colorful and can firmly hold toothpicks in place. It was a lot of fun working on this.
9. Gum drops are sometimes better than playdoh because as the playdoh dries, it becomes more and more brittle not suitable for building larger sculpture.
10. Shapes are not the only thing kids can learn in this project. They can also sort the gummi bears and the toothpicks by color. Sorting and classifying are also skills essential to succeed in kindergarten.
11. Let's not forget this activity also trains kids' eye-hand coordination and fine motor skill, too.
12. Last but not least, the fruit version is my favorite. Grapes hold up very well in large sculptures. They are healthy and yummy.