Although your toddler may not be able to pronounce the word "triangle," she is able to understand basic shape concepts. The shape concept is an important foundation for math skills that come later in life. Exposing your toddler to different shapes one at a time provides this important foundation. Spend at least one week on the triangle theme, reinforcing the concept through a variety of activities each day.
Learning By Feel
Use wooden blocks or a shape game; let your toddler feel the difference in the shapes. Hold a circle or ball shape. Show your toddler how to feel the curves and lack of corners. Point out the relatively blunt corners of the square or rectangle; contrast these with the sharper points of the triangle. Hide these basic shapes in a bag and ask your toddler to identify a triangle by feel.
Triangle Picture Activities
Cut out triangles and have your toddler paste them to make pictures, decorating them as desired. You can make tents, triangle fish, roofs for houses or sails for a boat. An elongated triangle can make a fir tree or an ice cream cone. Triangles also make great pennant flags, so make one in the colors of your family’s favorite team.
Triangle Food Activities
Triangular wedges of processed or cream cheese are available from some shops, while some tacos and chips come in triangle shapes. A few brands of cereals, crackers and sweets have triangle shapes, but the best triangle foods are still homemade. Slices of pie and pizza are roughly triangular, while bread and cheese can be cut into triangles. Use a triangle cookie cutter to let your toddler make cookies or to cut his own triangles from a slice of bread. Build an edible triangle by using pretzel sticks for the sides and pushing them into gum sweets for the corners.
Triangle Hunt
Mix up a variety of shapes on a tray; ask your toddler to pick out the triangles. You can do the same with building blocks or any shape game. Don’t worry about the differences between 3D and 2D triangular shapes at this age. Page through a child’s picture book; let your toddler point out triangles in the pictures. Take a walk down the road and see how many triangle-shaped roofs you can spot.
Triangle Music Activities
Most toddlers love music, so take the time to learn some short rhymes and songs that will reinforce the properties of triangles to your child, even if she is not yet old enough to understand them fully. Make the songs fun by forming triangles with the fingers or with the whole body. Mark out a triangle on the floor for your toddler to march on while singing a triangle song. Let your child play a musical triangle, although you may have to hold it for your toddler while she plays it.
