One of the things my students enjoy the most during the year is when we learn about shapes. They love taking the simple shapes we learn about and turning them into new objects! This idea also happens to tie in with a few of our math standards. This year, we spent some extra time exploring shapes and what we could make with them.
We used the Tangrams to practice making new shapes. The Tangrams come in a variety of colors, so it was easy for my students to find the pieces that belonged to them and for them to change out pieces to make their creations more colorful. My students enjoyed using the cards that came with the Tangrams to guide them through making shapes, but moved on to creating their own designs! They really loved when I challenged them to make squares! That took a lot of thinking on their part, but they were amazed they could make a big square from so many littler triangles!
My students also loved playing "Super Shape Toss"! I drew some shapes on a sheet of marine vinyl and the children had to match up those shapes with the Geometric Shaped Bean Bags. I watched them put the shapes together over and over again once they had tossed them all to see what other shapes they could make. It helped that right next to this group, there were children working with pattern blocks, so they used that for their inspiration. We have also used the Geometric Shaped Bean Bags as part of a greeting during our Morning Meeting. Each student took a bean bag and then had to find the other students who had the same shape as they did. They used their shapes to make a new shape and shared it with all of us.
I broke out the Giant Pattern Blocks a day or two before I introduced them in one of our Math lessons. During Math, we used our smaller pattern blocks to make shapes that our Math series provided for us. I put the shape sheets from our Math series on a bookshelf where I intended to clean them up later.
When I went back, they were gone! Imagine my surprise when my sweet students had borrowed them so they could make those same shapes with the Giant Pattern Blocks. They can't believe that pattern blocks can be this big! We also used the Giant Pattern Blocks to make hexagons in different ways. 
We got out our giant pocket die and I put pictures of each of the blocks on the sides. The children can roll the die and pick one of the shapes to help them make a hexagon. It's the same game we played on paper earlier in the week, but so much more fun because we played it in Giant Size!
After we studied homes and shelters, my students were excited to build their own structures with the Easy Stick Blocks! They quickly took a basket of different shapes and stuck them together to make homes with triangle shaped roofs and cards with wheels and sails.
Several of my students built homes with the solid Easy Stick Blocks and some used the open sided blocks to test which ones would stand up best to the Big Bad Wolf.
