This week I finished up the summer session of Mother Goose Time, a storytime for young children ages 18 months – 3 years. I tried to include more interactive elements this session, to encourage parents and caregivers to play and explore with their children. One new theme I tried was shapes. Before the program began, I outlined a large square and triangle in masking tape on the carpet. This was relatively easy to do since the carpet of the activity center is already divided into squares. The fi
rst book I introduced was Michael Hall’s second picture book, Perfect Square (Greenwillow, 2011). As the children entered the room they gathered three paper shapes – a red square, a yellow circle, and a blue triangle. Before beginning to read, I had them all hold up the red square and we counted the edges together.
I used the Humpty Dumpty rhyme from Saraj Ghoting and Pamela Martin Diaz’s Early Literacy Storytimes @Your Library: Partnering with Caregivers for Success (ALA, 2006). For this rhyme, children curve each hand into a half circle. They put their hands together to make an egg (a long circle shape), bring them apart when Humpty falls, and at the end, after “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again” shout “But I can!” and bring their hands back together. Repeat. And repeat again.
We counted the sides of the square again and of the triangle. We talked about how the circle had one side that kept going around and around, which they traced with a finger. I asked children 
hold up the yellow circle before we read part of Roseanne Thong’s Round is a Mooncake: a Book of Shapes (illustrated by Grace Lin, Chronicle, 2000) and they looked for the round moon and other round objects in the pictures.
Then I passed out ribbons for a free dance to Greg and Steve’s “Round in a Circle” song, from the CD We All Live Together, Vol. 1. We then all (parents, caregivers, children) joined hands in making a big circle, doing “Circle Songs from Long Ago” which includes Ring around the Rosy and Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (from Hap Palmer’s Early Childhood Classics: Old Favorites with a new Twist, 1998).
Our last book was Kevin Henkes’ Kitten’s First Full Moon(Greenwillow, 2004). 
Children held up the triangle for the kitten’s pointy ears and the circle for the moon or the bowl as I read the story.
At the end I brought out a tunnel for the children to crawl through and a pop up tent in the shape of a triangle so that they could explore being in a circle or being in a triangle. They were also encouraged to stand in and walk around the shapes on the floor. So we explored shapes in many different ways: visually, kinetically, spatially — looking at shapes, tracing shapes, making shapes with fingers (small motor skills) and with body parts (large motor), being inside shapes, and dancing and singing and reading about shapes.
The shapes storytime was much more fun that I had initially thought it might be. It turned out to be one of my favorite, and most successful, storytimes of the year. I also reminded parents that children have to learn shapes before they can learn to recognize letters. It’s a great early literacy skill!
If you haven’t seen Perfect Square yet, check out this trailer:
