Round as a Mooncake

Since my last post dealt with a book by Grace Lin, I thought I'd do another post with a book that she illustrated that Hadley likes.  This one is called Round as a Mooncake by Roseanne Thong, and was given to Hadley from my sister-in-law, Shani. 

In the story, a little girl walks through her home and neighborhood and notices things that are shaped like circles, squares, and rectangles.  The thing that I like about this book of shapes is that it not only reinforces the concept of shapes, but it introduces another culture to Hadley as well.  For example, when we are reading about squares, we learn about a name chop, a wood or stone stamp carved with a person's Chinese name, something that Hadley found fascinating.  At the same time, the little girl notices that her mobile phone is shaped like a rectangle. 

I thought a fun project to do with this book would be to notice things in our home that are shaped like circles, squares, and rectangles.  Actually, there are three points during the story where the little girl asks her readers where they might see these shapes in their homes.  So we stopped at each point and when the girls looked around for shapes, I took pictures of what they noticed.

Circles.

Squares (sort of).

And rectangles.

After we took several pictures, I printed them out and had Hadley tape them to a piece of butcher paper.  I had a box for circles, squares, and rectangles, and she put them in the correct box.

We hung the picture on a wall in our playroom, but I wanted to do more with the book then this.  I really wanted to find a way to intergrate shapes into our own heritage.  But all I could think to do was make baklava or grape leaves, and cut slices of Gouda into rectangles.  I must be running low on the creativity scale because I know there's more I could do to teach Hadley about her Dutch and Greek heritage, but I was tired that day. 

So we did this instead:

I typed a letter to several of my friends' children. In the letter, we explain a little bit about Round as a Mooncake, and then ask the recipient to send her a picture of something in his or her house that is shaped like a circle, square, or rectangle.  I thought that Hadley would think it's neat to add to her poster of shapes she started.  Plus, I think she'll get a kick out of seeing where each of the pictures came from.  She loves looking at maps, and she'll think it's cool that she got a letter from Colorado (you know who you are) or Texas (you know who you are).

I had Hadley write the child's name at the top of the letter, and sign her name at the bottom, and then we sent them off in the mail.

I'm excited to see what we get back.