Teach Shapes with a Creative GeoBoard

Geoboards are a great tool to teach shapes to preschoolers.  They love to use elastics to make triangles and squares, rectangles and diamonds.  I saw a unique post about a free form style geoboard on Pinterest.

I had the opportunity to make use of some extra wood the other day and decided to try making my own creative geoboard.  I chose a long piece of wood so a few kids could use the board at the same time in my home daycare.

The first step was to decorate the board.  We used markers because they were easy and eliminated any drying time.  The children and I had fun making up designs.

The next step was to hammer some long nails into the board.  I chose ones which had large heads so the elastics wouldn’t slip off.  Make sure to hammer the nails so they are secure but have a large section exposed for the elastics.

Traditional geo boards have nails or pegs in a uniform pattern.  Our creative geo board had nails that were not symmetrically spaced.  I thought this might be a problem when we formed our shapes but it worked out well.

The children stretched the elastics to form many different sized shapes.

I would suggest using colourful elastics if possible.  This would make it easier for the children to recognize the variety of shapes once there are many elastics covering the geoboard.

After we were done making shapes I made a few simple letters for the children to identify.  Letter “L” and letter “T” were great starters!  I showed the kids how to pluck the taunt elastics to create a twang.  We finished off our geoboard fun with some music.

I think this easy DIY toy will provide my daycare children with lots of creative fun on a rainy day.