Library shelves and publisher’s catalogs are full of picture books meant to teach children about shapes. The best ones are more than just simple concept books. They are relevant across the curriculum, contain engrossing stories, exemplify beautiful language, or inspire children to act and create on their own.
Explore the Connections Between Math and Art
A line goes on an adventure in When a Line Bends, a Shape Begins [Sandpiper, 2001], by Rhonda Gowler Greene. It becomes a circle, a rectangle, and even a crescent. Each two-page spread is devoted to a single shape, with many examples and rhyming text. Because it focuses on the use of line to create shapes, this book is a wonderful introduction to the intersection of math and art.
The first page of Suse MacDonald’s Shape by Shape [Little Simon, 2009] shows a die-cut circle as the eye of a mystery animal. Each successive page adds another die-cut shape and another portion of the mystery animal, until at the end of the book the mystery is revealed. Read in conjunction with Ed Emberly’s Go Away, Big Green Monster! [Little, Brown, 1992], it can inspire children to use simple shapes for their own artwork.
The Boy with Square Eyes, by Juliet Snape and Charles Snape [Little Simon, 1990] is a comical tale about a boy whose eyes become squares after watching too much TV. Everything the boy sees suddenly looks like a cube. While a bit heavy-handed with its anti-television moral, the book does demonstrate with clever illustration a different way of viewing common objects. Children may want to try drawing favorite objects as cubes.
Find the Shapes of Animals
Each page of Lois Ehlert’s Color Farm [HarperCollins 1990] shows a single animal composed of geometric shapes. Children will want to experiment with pattern blocks, tangrams, and construction paper shapes to see what animals and pictures they can create with simple shapes. Pair it with Ehlert’s Color Zoo [HarperCollins, 1989] and Ooodles of Animals [HarperCollins, 2008] for an introduction to where different animals live.
Kevin Henkes details a day in the life of the Circle Dogs [Greenwillow, 2001]. From the moment they wake up in their square house, the dogs’ play takes a number of different shapes. Circle Dogs celebrates everything about being a dog. Children will want to bounce, bark, and bend like the dogs in the book.
Solve Problems with a Mathematical Perspective
In Changes, Changes, a wordless picture book by Pat Hutchins [Aladdin, 1987] the same set of blocks are rearranged on each page as the block people face new challenges. Not only can children examine the two- and three-dimensional shapes that are used to make each object, but they can also be encouraged to identify the problems the block people need to overcome and to predict how they will solve them.
The first half of The Village of Round and Square Houses, by Anne Grifalconi [Little, Brown, 1986] talks about life in Tos, a village in central Africa, where the women live in round huts and the men live in square huts. The second half of the book relates a folk tale about how this arrangement came to be. The book presents an interesting example of how people use mathematical concepts to classify and order their worlds.
Picture books are a great way to introduce children to mathematical concepts, such as shapes, in preschool and the primary grades, but are most useful in the classroom when they have additional educational purposes. Take a closer look at these and other geometry-themed books on Amazon.
Nicole Fravel - Ms. Fravel is an educator, curriculum developer, and parent with over 15 years of experience in elementary and early childhood ...
Join the Conversation