It’s common to start learning shapes and colors during early childhood. Shapes are easy concepts to learn naturally that have a huge impact on a child’s future education. These shapes coloring pages are great for the little ones to start practicing this topic!
Even before children develop speech, they have the ability to notice how the objects are shaped. From clouds, trees, and animals, to basic shapes in toys, children get to study and catalog their surroundings using shapes.
This natural learning is the basis for children’s literacy, math, organizational skills, and language learning, and more. But, how does a child learn the shapes?
At first, by sight! As they grow up, they get used to the shapes they can see every day, like the circles in the wheels of a toy car, or the square in a slice of cheese. After 18 months of age, a child can recognize and name basic shapes like circles, squares, and triangles.
Then, during preschool, they reinforce what they have already learned and also pick up new concepts of more complex shapes like diamonds, stars, or hearts. To learn these shapes, they not only have to use their motor skills but also their language skills to memorize the name.
By recognizing these geometric forms, a child is able to identify and learn the letters. This skill is needed to start learning the alphabet since the first step is to visually recognize the letters by their shapes in order to learn their sounds.
Acquiring these skills at a young age results in children who are better prepared, even more so when the little ones are learning English as a second or foreign language since knowing the names of shapes in English can help them build a better vocabulary and to become more proficient at it.
These coloring sheets for children will help you spark your little one’s creativity while also learning the shapes. Through coloring, they can also practice the colors in English and work on their fine motor skills.
Apart from coloring, these printable drawings are great to practice writing and spelling in English. Each page has a different shape and two versions of their written name: one to learn how to write it and the other one to trace the word in English.
Go over the word several times and make sure to stop on each letter and practice their sound and pronunciation. After, you can try incorporating the shape word into a sentence, for example: “There are lots of stars in the sky”, “She has a star on her shirt”, this is a perfect way to practice more vocabulary and even to practice topics such as the personal pronouns in English.
Finally, when coloring, remember that creativity is important! So you can print several copies of the same drawing and encourage your little one to use different colors on each drawing, to let their creativity flow.
Once you’ve finished with the coloring sheets, you can do some extra practice by asking your little one to identify the different shapes in the objects around his or her room or around the house. What shapes can your child find in the kitchen? Mabe a rectangle in the microwave, or an oval in a spoon!
Additionally, you can use songs in English such as the “Shapes Song” and have a fun time dancing and singing while learning this important subject!
