After reading What Could it Be? Exploring the Imaginative World of Shapes to my 3 year old daughter, I was inspired to make our own shape stamps to use.
It may just be the teacher in me but I’m big on using books for inspiring art activities. Creating art activities based around books that your child reads is such a great way to expand your child’s knowledge. It allows them to explore the concepts in the book in a different way, thereby creating a deeper understanding of the content. In this case, it was the concept of shapes.
While miss 3 was engaged in the activity, there was a lot of conversation about the different shapes, how they were being used, along with some very cool story-telling happening. The book had been brought to life for her.
This is an activity I’ve done with my classroom before. But because they were a little older, they were able to design and make their own set of stamps. You can purchase pine framing timber from any timber supply store (such as Bunnings, or Mitre 10), or  you can just salvage scrap timber.
How to make shape stamps
You will need:
Foam
Glue gun
Glue
42mm x 19mm pine framing timber, or similar
Pen
Scissors
Shapes from around the house to trace around
Ink pad or paint
Paper
How to make the stamps:
1. Cut your wood into 45mm square blocks this is a great size cut for little hands
2. Decide on your shapes and trace around them onto your foam. We used cookie-cutters, small cups, etc.
3. Cut the shapes out
4. Hot glue gun the shapes onto the blocks.
Once your glue is dry, which won’t take very long at all they’re ready to use.
Now comes the fun part. Let your child (and your own inner child) go wild. The day we made our shape blocks we didn’t have any ink pads available, so we used paint instead, which worked out great. You just have to put a little less paint on them and we got around that by painting the paint onto the block with brushes, rather than dipping it.
If you do give this a try we would love to see some of your creations. Just use the hashtag #kiwifamilies on Instagram or post your creations to our Facebook wall.
