Giant Magnetic "ColorForms"

When teaching kindergarten about shapes, you may make these giant, magnetic "ColorForms" to demonstrate how to make pictures of objects out of circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, crescents, and octagons. I did this in student teaching and the kids loved it. I even let them practice with them before creating their shape pictures. In the lesson, the students were instructed to cut out as many shapes (octagons, crescents, triangles, squares, rectangles, and circles) as they could. All of the shapes were separated and put on Styrofoam meat trays with the shape drawn on the edge. In the next class each student was given a unique checklist of different numbers of each shape. The students then gathered those shapes, checked them off when they had enough of their shapes, and created a picture of something (anything they wanted, but of something), by gluing the shapes to the paper.