30 Days of Shapes – Lesson Plan for Preschool

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Planning on homeschooling your preschooler this year? Homeschooling a preschool-age child can be so much fun and so easy to incorporate into your day! Here is our Shapes Lesson Plan for Preschool.

Planning on homeschooling your preschooler this year? Homeschooling a preschool-age child can be so much fun and so easy to incorporate into your day! Here is our Shapes Lesson Plan for Preschool. #shapes #preschoollessonplan #homeschoolingpreschool

30 Days of Shapes – Lesson Plan for Preschool

I remember when I was first able to start homeschooling my oldest. It was un-official for a few reasons….

First, he was still quite young. We did more normal preschool type curriculum the next year. But for the first year we wanted him to start learning some basics and mostly just get used to the idea of a routine and following instructions.

And second, it’s not official homeschooling since I didn’t plan on doing regular homeschooling but something more like half homeschooling and half un-schooling. We will see how that works as time goes on. 🙂 Basically we believe that life skills and creativity are just as important as “book learning” and we want our littles to have a healthy mix of both.

Lesson Plans for Preschool

What do I know about homeschooling? Well if you didn’t already know, I graduated from being homeschooling (5th grade through high school). So I’m proud to say we are second-generation homeschoolers. I’m no expert but now that my mom has well over 15 years of homeschooling experience, I’m relying on her expertise and my creativity to make our lesson plan for preschool happen. We’ve always hoped that it would be a part of our simple living journey and I’ve collected books for years (even before we had children) while dreaming about this day. Do I sound crazy yet? It’s ok, life isn’t fun without a little crazy!

Like most things in our life, we’d love to have you along for our homeschooling journey as well. A few weeks ago I asked on the Little House Living Facebook page how many homeschoolers are Little House Living readers and I was amazed at the response! Even if you don’t plan on homeschooling, you may be able to use many of the activities I plan on posting in your day to day lifestyle.

Ok, with all that out of the way now let’s get to how we put this together and what we did.

Lesson Plan for Preschool

Shapes Lesson Plans

Goals:

  • 30 days of learning (doesn’t need to be all in a row)
  • Focus on one main topic during the 30 days
  • To create a routine that is easy to follow each day
  • To teach what “following instructions” means

We were hoping that if we achieved these goals with the next year of “schooling” it will set us up for an even better year of learning next year.

Daily Schedule:

  1. Breakfast
  2. School Time
  3. Free Play
  4. Snack Time
  5. Life Skills
  6. Free Play
  7. Story Time
  8. Activity
  9. Lunch
  10. Nap

I’m not putting a time on any of these activities, everything will happen in a natural flow and not a forced setting so it becomes routine instead of a strict and stressful schedule. Free play is indoor or outdoor play depending on the weather, school time is your typical “homeschool” time (ie: a worksheet), life skills is a project to do with mommy (ie: sweeping, dusting, cooking, etc), and the activity is what you will see in the section below. And yes, the nap is for the little ones, not for mommy!

Shapes Lesson Plan for Preschool

As I mentioned in the title, we started by learning shapes! All of the early preschool lessons we did were: Shapes, Colors, Numbers (1-10), and Animals. My hope was that learning those basic areas would set him up to start learning the alphabet next year. Each study is be 30 days long and we don’t need to do a school activity each day depending on what is going on.

Lesson Plan for Preschool

Preschool Lesson Plan Details:

Each day will start off with a homemade breakfast. I’ve been working hard on meal planning to get back into my once a month routine and trying to plan out breakfasts and lunches as well so we have an easy day and no stress trying to figure out what’s to eat!

We will then move into “school time”. This will either be a page from Rod and Staff’s Preschool Books or a coloring or tracing page based on shapes. We chose Rod and Staff because of the simple set up of the preschool curriculum and we will first be going through the books doing the activities and tracing with fingers and then doing them a second time with a crayon or marker. The idea behind actually using some kind of curriculum is to reinforce the idea of following instructions.

After this, it’s time for a session of free play either indoors or outdoors depending on the weather.

And then it’s snack time. For the shapes study I thought it would be fun to do different snacks that are in different shapes (or at least talk about the shape of his snack, “Look, grapes are oval!” I’m sure this won’t happen every day. 🙂

Then we will do some kind of life skill. For us, this means having Farmer Boy help sweep the floor (he has his own little cleaning set!), or dust the furniture, or wash the windows, or even help with supper prep. Anything that is a basic skill that he will need to know as he grows older.

Back to free play again for some fun and creativity.

Storytime is going to be a part of our daily routine because Farmer Boy absolutely loves books. During this time he will have one book that I picked out that reinforces the study (shapes) and then he can pick out as many books as he wants to have us read to him. We placed a bookshelf at his level in the dining room so he has his choice!

When he is done reading books we will have some kind of activity or craft that is on our unit topic (and you can find the list below). I have these all prepared in advance so we just simply need to pull out the bag with the pieces for the craft and can do it together.

After the craft is done there will be lunchtime and then a good long nap and it officially will end our “school” day.

Lesson Plan for Preschool

Shapes Crafts and Activities for Preschool

Each day we will have a craft or activity to do that reinforces the unit study of shapes. Here is the list of the shapes activities for the 30 days of study.

Day 1: Circles Bear
Day 2: Chalk Shapes (outside, weather permitting)
Day 3: Shape Bean Bag Toss Game (homemade bean bags tossed onto shapes cut out of construction paper)
Day 4: Heart Lion
Day 5: Goo Shapes (drawing shapes in one of these sensory bags)
Day 6: Shapes Mobile
Day 7: Train Shapes
Day 8: Shape Hopscotch
Day 9: Shapes Game
Day 10: Shape Chicken
Day 11: Shapes Matching Game
Day 12: Highway Shapes
Day 13: Contact Paper Shapes (shapes stuck to the sticky side of contact paper)
Day 14: Heart Raccoon
Day 15: Shapes Game
Day 16: Shapes Scavenger Hunt
Day 17: Matches Game
Day 18: Shape Hopscotch
Day 19: Little House Shape Craft
Day 20: Oval Mouse
Day 21: Shape Suncatcher
Day 22: Playdough Shapes (using homemade Play Dough)
Day 23: Dump Truck Shapes
Day 24: Shape Bean Bag Game
Day 25: Little Red Hen Craft
Day 26: Shapes Game
Day 27: Car Shapes
Day 28: Matches Game
Day 29: Contact Paper Shapes
Day 30: Shape Pumpkin

All of the activities are something I have been able to put together with craft supplies I have here at home and a few games that I’ve picked up as used book sales or garage sales. I did buy a few things to supplement our study and that was a Shapes Puzzle (that we will also use for the colors study) and a Shapes Chart. (Farmer Boy loves looking at pictures on the walls so this will be great reinforcement of our study that we can hang on the wall in our library room.)

Well, that was our plan for our Shapes Unit Study! Our next preschool study will be colors.

Homeschooling a little one? Here are some more tips you might be able to use!

Busy Bags for Preschoolers

$1 and Under Busy Bag Ideas

How to Create Unit Studies for Less Than $5

Homeschooling with a Toddler

Are you planning on homeschooling or supplementing your child’s education at home? What does your daily routine look like?

merissabio

This Shapes Lesson Plan for Preschool was originally posted on Little House Living in September 2014. It has been updated as of September 2019.

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16 Comments

  1. I love your plan! I’ve been working on teaching my three-year-old basic shapes, letters, and counting, but so far, we’ve been VERY unschooled about it because he has no interest whatsoever is sitting still and using a workbook. 😛

    I’m looking through all the crafts you linked to (thanks for that!), and I think he’ll like some of those though!

  2. We used a book I found at LaLache years ago. It was a preschool at home book. Very good. It gave lots of ideas that could be used by someone homeschooling or even doing preschool with other families.

  3. Thankyou so much for sharing and being so inspirational . Im going to give this as a guideline for our little man soon to be 3 in November .

  4. Hello! I think its great that your getting him started on a routine it really does help no matter what kind of schooling you choose. We are a homeschooling family also. We have a 4th grader a 1st grader and a 3 yr old preschooler! We use an online curriculum based school my kids need the extra structure and i like them having an actual teacher that they can turn to if im not explaining things to them clear enough. I love the idea of unschooling but the laws about it are different from state to state so we try to incorporate the life skills into our daily learning. Good luck with your homeschooling adventure!

  5. our routine!

    1.breakfast
    2.brush teeth (maybe get dressed)
    3.Table time-calender ,days of the week,journal writing,
    4.subject work
    5.11:00 lunch time
    6.recess outside or in if weather is bad
    7.subject work
    8.silent reading time
    9.dinner prep
    also during all this time i do my house chores and preschool work with the 3 yr old!
    during recess and after school is when i also do what needs done in the garden! we also take breaks depending on the moods of the day!

  6. I’m so excited to see this post! I nearly e-mailed you a few months ago when I found out I was pregnant with our first baby to ask you if you planned on homeschooling. I’ve also been collecting books and educational materials for years, long before I even knew my husband, in preparation for that day. Mind you I’m not even due until February, but homeschooling is already on my brain :-). I absolutely love the idea of homeschooling/unschooling!

    1. Congratulations Jamie! I hope you find these 30 day plans useful….schooling will come up sooner than you think it should, it seems like yesterday I was holding our little 2 day old boy. 🙂

  7. Thanks so much for sharing this! Our teachers are on strike so we have started doing some homeschooling with our oldest and I wanted to find something for my little guy to do at the same time. Just curious if there was some reason you decided to start with shapes instead of something else?

    1. Hi Amanda, we started with shapes because our little boy knows a few of them already so I thought it would be something a little easier for him to start with (since my main goal is just to teach him to follow directions). Also, we are going to start colors next and I found lots of activities that incorporate both colors and shapes and I thought that would be a great way to reinforce the first unit study while working on a second and adding to what he’s learning now.

  8. Hi, ladies
    Thank you so much for sharing this page ;). My daughter is 4 and I just found out because her birthday is September 9th, she will not be starting kindergarten next year in 2015, and since pre-schools are so expensive and I am lucky enough to be able to stay at home this year because I am pregnant. I love the idea of getting my daughter on a pre-preschool schedule plus supplementing with putting her in a sport or ice skating this fall/winter to occupy her time. I absolutely love the fun and easy crafts posted in this page, and I literally was having a terrible time getting her to bed at the same time each night, but started reading her 3 stories (short) or 2 (long) to put her to sleep and amazingly it works. So I would love to work in a craft time, learning time, ect into each of her days. And I am thinking of making a basic timeline for each day like the one’s listed above.

    Wake up
    Brush teeth
    Get dressed
    Morning (learning cartoon)
    Writing letters
    Mom’s home cooked meal
    Clean up house/room
    Errands
    Lunch
    Craft time/Chalk writing
    Park
    Pre-prep for dinner
    Family time (after daddy get’s home from work)
    Another learning activity for a 4 year old
    Help mommy cook dinner
    Dinner
    Snack creative idea
    before bed cartoon/kids movie and popcorn
    Bath time
    Story time
    Bed

    I’ve never really thought to do something like this, but absolutely love the idea of getting her on a schedule. When she went to La Petite, I never understood how they got the kids to everyday have a routine because when hailey was home, it didn’t quite work out like that….but practice makes perfect.

    Also does anyone have learning idea’s for a 4 year old?

    And i wanted to share one idea i read on pinterest for the parent’s having a hard time with their kids putting toys away. Play library with them. Set up a toy box or closet and pick a number of toys you want to allow your kid to play with at one time 😉 then before she can get another one make her check them into their paces 🙂 it work with my baby girl….Just a suggestion.

  9. Hi Merissa, I just purchased your book after borrowing it from the library and loving it! I started following your blog and noticed you homeschool and said that you were homeschooled. We homeschool too! I have four children ages from 19-5. I was wondering if you or your mom would have any tips on making school more enjoyable for my fourth, first and kindergarten students? School has become drudgery for my kiddos lately. Thank you so much! Stacey

    1. Hi Stacey, yes we are just getting into schooling our little ones but I grew up being homeschooled from 5th grade through high school. I loved when I was able to choose some of the “classes” that I wanted to take. I also loved doing extra classes like art and pottery. My children are younger but they love when learning goes along with some “cool” activity…like making slime, or going on a nature walk, or just about ANYTHING hands on. I don’t know if that helps you at all but good luck with everything!