Cloud Shapes for Preschool

This activity will help children explore shapes around them and how to fill up blank space! They’ll love pulling apart t...

This activity will help children explore shapes around them and how to fill up blank space! They’ll love pulling apart the cotton balls and gluing them onto their papers. This is great practice to build those fine motor muscles and to practice spatial exploration. 

  Explore Outside: Get inspired on which shapes to draw! On a somewhat cloudy day, invite your child to look for shapes and objects in the sky. Use these as inspiration on your paper to recreate the images they saw outside!

️Practice Makes Perfect! Invite your child to create the shapes on the paper alone, either by tracing, hand over hand or doing it on their own - another fine motor muscle win!

Be Descriptive:  Talk about the lines, curves and points in each shape on their paper- this will help kiddos better understand how many points, lines, and curves are in each shape and better understand the differences in each shape!

Step 1

Start by drawing shapes on your construction paper. They can be any size and any shape - get creative!

Step 2

Have your child start by putting a bit of glue inside of one shape.

Step 3

Have your child pull apart cotton balls and place them inside the shape they just put the glue inside, one bit at a time. Although this may take some time for them to pull apart, the glue should stay sticky long enough during this process.

Step 4

Continue the process for each shape, ensuring the child fills up the shapes completely with bits of cotton balls. 

️ For older preschoolers:  Think outside the box and create intricate shapes with small nooks for them to fill up the space with cotton balls! This will encourage them to really practice their hand-eye coordination when applying the glue for their cotton balls to stick.

️ For younger toddlers: Once their cotton balls have been glued to the paper, trace the outline of the shapes with a marker to really highlight the shape. You can also take the finished project outside to see if you can find any shapes on the paper in the sky!

How many cotton balls did it take to fill up the square?

How many bits of cotton did you get from this cotton ball?

What type of cloud do these cotton balls look like? 

Can you stretch one cotton ball to fill the whole shape?

What other materials could we use to change the texture of our shape clouds to look like other cloud types?

Cognitive

Spatial exploration