Shapes Don’t Bug Me from Learning Resources is a fabulous little educational activity set aimed at children aged 5-9 although both my children ages 3 and 6 have loved playing with this and had lots of fun learning about shapes and how they fit together.
The set comprises of 20 double sided activity cards ranging in difficulty from 1 up to 20. There are also 136 translucent plastic shapes included in 14 different variants including 5 different triangles, 2 different squares, hexagon, trapezoid, rhombus, circle, half circle and quarter circle. They also come in different colours helping to distinguish between the different shapes.
My two children were immediately eager to have a go and grabbed an activity card and got stuck in building the pictures with the shapes. I thought this was brilliant for Mister B, as he loved the easier bug pictures and had such a great sense of achievement when he had finished one. It was also a fun way for him to learn new shapes like a rhombus and trapezium. I was also trying to teach him a semi circle and it was great to do this with two halves and put them together to build a circle.
Although initial impressions may seem like this is quite easy, Miss M tackled some of the harder activity cards and they certainly challenged her. It was great to see her tackling some of the more mathematical ones, using smaller triangles to make larger triangles and again helping her get to grips with the make up of a circle, talking about halves, quarters and how many of each are needed to make a circle.
The trickiest cards contained just one large outline of a shape such as a triangle or a rhombus and you had to fill the inside completely with smaller shapes to make the larger one. Miss M had some really good attempts but they weren’t quite sitting accurately on the lines so I set about trying them with her. I have to say it took me a few attempts to fill them so there is definitely plenty of challenge in this set.
We’ve really enjoyed trying out the Shapes Don’t Bug Me geometry set, it is something that a good age range of children will enjoy and learn from and is bright, colourful and attracts children to sit and play. It’s also trickier than it looks so has plenty of learning potential and I think it’s brilliant that the activity cards are numbered in difficulty levels.
All reviews are my own and my family’s opinions and we received the set in order to write the review.
