Over the last month the kids have been using their Dive into Shapes set a lot. Playing around with 3D shapes, adding shapes together to create new shapes and making some very unusual creative designs (ie mom talk for some strange shape building). So I thought it might be fun to show the kids how to draw the 3D shapes and help them recreate some of the shapes onto paper.
We started off by creating each shape using the rods and connectors from our Dive Into Shapes set.
Then we would chat about what 2D shapes they could see inside the 3D shape – are there squares, triangles, rectangles etc and how are they combined – straight lines or curved lines. And then we just started drawing and talking about why their different attempts were not quite working and how we could “fix them”.
To help my youngest I did get some graph paper out and we practice drawing the shapes using different colours – so all the vertical lines were red and all the horizontal lines were blue.
It seemed to help and after doing a few of these colourful practice shapes he was quite able to create them by himself.
And after just a little bit of practice they started using their 3D shapes to create objects
And yes not all the lines are quite right yet but after just a short drawing session they were both creating 3D shapes with ease and experimenting with ways of using them.
I am a firm believer that when the kids get to play around by building shapes they start to understand how the angles and lines fit together and I do believe that the more they understand the way the shapes are formed the more they will be able to translate that understanding into their drawings.
ofamily learning together 
Very impressed with this art lesson….they will start to look at the world differently. Objects far away are smaller etc. Well done.
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