Make and Play with Shape Dice!

Are you looking for some fun and educational activities to do with your preschooler?  Right now Chuck's home with me and we try to squeeze in at least one educational activity in each day. So far we've tested out cardboard rigidity by building bridges, explored art materials like scientists, and learned about shapes with a shape touch and feel game.  

While I enjoy thinking up new activities to do with Chuck, sometimes I do get burned out.  It's hard finding new activities everyday day!  So that's why I'm excited to announce a new collaboration that I'm doing with 4 other fabulous bloggers.  Twice a month we will be presenting 5 different takes on preschool learning themes.  Yup.  Isn't that neat?  I'm super stoked.  So in addition to seeing one great idea here, you'll also see links to 4 other really creative and fun preschool learning activities.

Our first collaborative preschool theme is Shapes and here's my activity!  (Definitely check out the 4 other ideas at the end of the post!)

DIY Shape Dice

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Cool right?  Instead of using a normal dice to play board games, here's a fun twist.  Switch out the numbers and use shapes instead!  Now your child can learn counting and shapes at the same time.

So let's make a dice and see how we can play with it!

Materials Needed

• Corrugated Cardboard
• Scissors
• Duck Tape
• Hot Glue
• Sharpie Markers
• Board Game

Let's Make Some Shape Dice!

1.  Cut out 6 cardboard squares.

2.  Draw different shapes on the squares.
3.  Use your hot glue gun to glue the squares together to resemble a cube.  It's ok if your cube isn't so beautiful looking. Mine certainly wasn't.  Luckily, my handy dandy Duck Tape hid and secured the edges.

Now let's play!

I had previously made this frog game for Chuck because he loved frogs. (But you could certainly use classic games like this one or this one.)  At first we used normal dice to play.  But this time I swapped out the normal dice for the shape dice.

We took turns throwing our large shape dice.  Then, we counted the number of straight sides that the shape on top had.  Then, we moved our pieces accordingly.

This definitely made the game more challenging!

After playing the board game version, we went outside and drew our own game board on the ground.  Chuck had fun throwing the dice and then pretending to be a frog hopping from space to space.

Does Chuck know all of his shapes after playing with this dice?  Definitely not.  But did he get exposure to some new shapes and practice his counting?  Yup.  So the activity was a win-win for me. We're going to periodically pull the dice out when we want to practice our shapes some more.

And now, tada!  Let the shape learning continue!

Here are 4 more great shape activities from the other Creative Preschool Collaborators!

• Artsy Momma's Shapes Busy Bag
• I Heart Crafty Thing's Ship Craft and Shape Matching Game
• A Little Pinch of Perfect's Build and Learn Shape Factory
• Hand Made Kids Art's Draw, Build, and Create Shapes with Cardboard

Let's Keep In Touch!

You can always find other fun ideas on my Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter accounts!

Happy Learning!