Shapes, Shapes, Shapes: A Fun Wordless Picture Book About Geometry Using Photographs for Kids

by Tana Hoban

Geometric shapes are all around us! In this wordless
book from top-selling picture-book creator Tana Hoban, children learn to look
closely to find them. Circles, squares, stars, triangles, hearts, and
rectangles—how many can you see? 

Simple, clear, practical, Shapes, Shapes, Shapes is a fun way for children to learn. Sit together with a child at home or in a preschool classroom and use this book to enjoyably teach this core preschool/kindergarten geometry.

Dozens of real-world photographs of buildings,
shoes, people at work, and more help young readers build observation skills as
they hunt for shapes hidden in plain sight.

“This marvelous
book from a top notch photographer gives children the opportunity to see the
world around them, not just look at it,” said Publishers Weekly. “Do your eyes a favor, and don’t miss this one," wrote School Library Journal.

Genres: Mathematics, Picture Books, Childrens, Geometry, Art, Nonfiction, School

32 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 1986

Reviews

[Suzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tana Hoban's concept books are just wonderful. Modern children are sometimes put off by the black and white photography of Hoban's older books, so these are better "lap" books, for an adult to read with a young child. Because her later life was spent in Paris, Hoban's photographs have a really different feel, which I love. Here is a link to her obit, for anyone interested: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/art....

[Neha Amin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review: This is a very colorful picture book. It has pictures of shapes that are all around us, inside and outside. The book has concrete shapes and also shapes that are harder to see. This book could be used for beginners and children who are a bit more advance since it has a variety of pictures.

Utilization: I would utilize this book while teaching children shapes. I would also pick one page from the book and ask them to find and name all the shapes of the page. This activity could be done repeatedly to ensure that the children have grasped the content of shapes.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shapes, shapes, shapes
By: Tana Hoban
A Mulberry Paperback Book
This is a wordless book that includes vivid photographs on each page of different items seen in a variety of settings (including international and urban contexts). Children can recognize the shapes they see in each photograph – and take note of how many shapes they see as there are a number of instances where there are multiple shapes to be counted on a page (i.e. a truck filled with boxes, weaved round baskets hanging up). The beginning of the book provides a picture and word supported guide for children to begin looking for before the pages are turned(i.e. arcs, hearts, ovals, trapezoids, etc.)
Genre: Concept/Photography Book
Theme/Keywords: Shapes, Counting
Features of Print: Wordless, photographs only
Language Considerations: Any
Cultural Considerations: This book shows a variety of pictures that display multicultural contexts/people
Open-ended questions: What can we do to help us see all of the shapes around us?
Extension Activities: Find something that is a shape at home or outside of school/take a picture or draw and share with the class at a later time.

[Destiney Dickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lit Requirement: Concepts
Grade level: Pre-K
Reading level: D
Copyright: 1986 Tanya Haban
Number of pages: 32
Genre: Non-fiction
Book format: hardcover

There are shapes everywhere you look. Shapes, shapes, shapes, provides real life pictures of different places and items that have a variety of shapes. Some photos are of people engaging in activities or daily routines while others are pictures of inanimate objects. There is also a page at the beginning of the book that list all of the shapes the reader should look for. There is a picture of the shape itself with its name next to it. This book would be a great resource for children learning and practicing their shapes. It allows them to connect what they are learning to daily life activities and items they see on a regular basis. It is colorful and helps capture and keep the attention of the reader. I would definitely recommend this book for children in preschool and kindergarten.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

"SHapes, Shapes, Shapes" by Tana Hoban allows the reader to explore, not only the story, but their everyday life, and how shapes are all around them. The book starts off with a quick picture glossary of many of the shapes that are out there. It lets the reader know what they are going to be exposed to and tries to encourage them to see how many times they can find the different shapes throughout the book. Overall, the book is wordless and just has real-life snap shots of various pictures that we see in our everday life. It is generally just allowing the reader to understand that shapes are made up all around us whether we know it or not. I do believe this to be a great book to view with students who are just beginning to learn their shapes, where they can look through and explore as many shapes as they possibly can!

[Destiny]

The end pages of this book consist of random objects. Most the pages are actual pictures in which the reader searches for shapes on their list. This helps relate math to relife situations. The reader learns what shapes are and learns how important math is in their lives. After the opening page showing the shapes to look for there are no words to go with the picture so as i reader i had to look for the shapes and experiance everything in the picture with my own conclusions. The book is set in landscape form meaning that the story doesnt focus on certain human characters. The pictures have something about them that makes it seem like they are old and infact it came out in 1986. This book is a lot differ4ent then a shape book would b know days and its good that i can tell the difference before checking it out.

[Agilar Janeet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shapes, Shapes, Shapes. Hoban, Tana. New York: Greenwillow, 1986. Genre: Shape’s Concept Picture book. Age range 4 to 8 years old. Shapes, Shapes, Shapes is a collection of indoor and outdoor pictures where readers can discover different shapes such as circles, squares, stars, triangles, hearts, and rectangles. The book’s plot are shapes and there is an absence of characters, writing language, and empty spaces on the pictures because they embrace the whole pages. The lines are thin, both horizontal and vertical with a variety of different shapes. My rating is 3 of 5 because the absence of language might confuse the readers about what to look for. I would not choose this book to introduce shapes to students but to review the topic with 6-8 years old. I would make them recognized as many shapes as possible and perhaps to form teams to awake their interest and make it more challenge

[Jodysegal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shapes, Shapes, Shapes dates from 1986, but it's still a great concept book that introduces children both to shapes and photography. Some lovely compositions of urban and daily life bring shapes to life for very young children. The book includes no text other than an introduction to the shapes they can look for in the pictures, and she includes a good range of shapes, from arcs to trapezoids with the usual suspects in between.

CIP: Photographs of familiar objects such as chair, barrettes, and a manhole cover present a study of rounded and angular shapes.

SLJ: Adults and kids of all shapes and sizes are in for a treat with this outstanding wordless book. Hoban's full color photos have an astonishing clarity and glow to them.

[Mary Conroy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gives an excellent opportunity to let students explore where we see geometric shapes in our world. The book is complied of photographic images depicting everyday scenes, like the floor of a mall, the skyline of a city, and a construction site. There are no words, but it still would be ideal for an interactive lesson, because students could point out all the different shapes they find in each picture. It could also be used for a center activity, where students could compete to see who can find the most geometric shapes in each picture. This book would probably would work best for kindergarten, first, and second grade students. It would be a good introduction to an activity where students go home and list all the shapes they see in their neighborhood and community.

[Kayla Pollema · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has no words and is used to show where shapes occur in everyday life.
The pictures in this book are photographs of everyday things. The common photographs provide many opportunities to connect to the text while looking for the hidden shapes. The photographs are taken in color but often have a dull color scheme. The theme of the pictures is shapes. Some of the photos are very apparent in their purpose but others make the reader look more deeply to find the shapes. Although the style is photography, pictures did not captivate the readers. When a book has no words the photographs need to tell the story, but this book seems to be more random then one would expect.

[Taylor Nolan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Because this is a wordless picture book, the book was printed in landscape orientation. Each page is filled with a different image of a real life object or scene. Instead of reading words on each page, the reader is supposed to see what kinds of shapes they can find in each image. Most of the images have countless different shapes within it, and it is up to the reader to find all of them. Each image as a solid white border. I think this is to really help the reader concentrate on the image in order to find the shapes. I really liked how a variety of different images were used in this book. They show many different objects as well as different cultures.

[Megan MacDonald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shapes are everywhere. This picture book is a great interactive book for children to see how shapes are seen in places all around and in their everyday lives. This book can be used for children to learn, remember, and recall shapes as well as use their imagination. This book is also a good way for children to make text-to-self and text-to-world connections as they can relate the shapes to other books they may have read, pictures they have seen, or even places they have been. This book helps you to think outside of the box....or is it a square...or a rectangle...or a diamond...!?

[Laura Mincey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a wordless picture book that is great to share with young students who are learning about shapes! Student will not read words in this book, but they will be able to express what they SEE in each picture, using mathematical shape terms. This is a great math book to keep in a Pre-K classrooms for young learners. Students will love not having to worry about reading words they aren't quite able to decode yet, but rather, they can tell the story from their own words, describing what they see and how shapes are seen in everyday life.

[Heather Torgersen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this wordless book by Tana Hoban, we see different scenes on every page, and all the countless shapes that make up that one scene. This is a great book for children who are learning about shapes, and this gives them the opportunity to practice identifying them. I have seem this book in a big book version as well, and I am sure that the large version would be extremely beneficial to the class as well.

[Neil Nicholson]

This is a word-less book. It contains pictures in the environment that has natural shapes. Students can look through the book and see what types of shapes they can find.Another class activity would be for students to take a field trip into their environment (i.e. the school, surrounding neighborhood) so that students can document all the natural shapes they find in the environment. I recommend this book for all ages

[Jayetta Carter-mcfarlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book says so much with colorful photographs and no words. Across elementary school grades Pre-K - 5, I could use it. In math classes, teachers can engage students by helping them to find connections with how geometric shapes can be found in every place, including homes and a game of hopscotch. The same book can be used for art students to explore shapes and forms in artwork and their daily lives.This book will challenge the mind of students because it speaks volumes with few words.

[Miriam Amaya · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a landscape orientation. The dust jacket and the hard cover are the same. The end pages have different kinds of objects representing shapes. Before we start looking at the photographs there is a page where it has the name and pictures of shapes to look for throughout the book. All of the photographs are pictures of real things in life. They also have a white border with no words at all.

[Allie Vossoughi · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a wordless picture book designed to intrigue the audience by challenging them to find shapes in the illustrations. The book is designed in landscape format, mainly due to the fact that there are no human-like characters to focus on. The book starts out with a glossary of the shapes with names for each one. Each end page is filled with random objects. I think this helps the reader connect the math oriented focus of the book to it's significance in real life.

[Quynh Le · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book talked about a variety of shapes. I liked that there's no words in the book, allowing students to come up with their own story based on the pictures. In class, students can work in groups and walk around the classroom to record all the different shapes they see in the classroom. Another idea is to have each group go on a separate scavenger hunt for a different shape and have them come together at the end to share their findings.

[Megan Piero · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book for teaching about shapes and geometry. This book provides students with real life example of shapes and what they are used to create. As an extension activity, I would send students on a "treasure hunt" around my classroom or maybe even around the playground or the school and have them look for shapes. I would give them recording sheets to write about and draw the shapes they saw.

[Winta · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is good for children beginning to learn shapes because they can name shapes they see in each page. The teacher gave us a big piece of paper with the name and picture of a shape after finishing the book, and we worked in small groups and wrote things that have that shape. I think that's a great critical thinking activity for kids to do after finishing the story.

[Kristen Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a picture book full of lots of real pictures from the world around us. Thee pictures are of things you would see every day. The book shows a bunch of shapes that you are suppose to look for when looking at the pictures. This is a great book to use as an activity because the children love picking out the hidden shapes that the picture naturally make.

[Brittnee · Rating 4 out of 5]

really interesting book that takes real pictures and has multiple shapes within all of them. great for asking children what shapes they see in each picture to see what they have learned about shapes. this would be great for first grade in the beginning for shapes like circle square triangle and then to do it again at the end of the year for them to catch more shapes like cube cone sphere..

[Madonna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is great for integrating into a geometry lesson. I would use it to begin a math lesson and have the children become more familiar with naming the different shapes they recognize in the pictures. It's nice because there are no words, children create the text during conversation about the shapes they notice on the pages.

[Tichina Fung-chung]

Shapes, Shapes, and Shapes is a picture book and I love it because Hoban takes photographs of objects all over the city that I'm sure everyone has seen, but never really noticed the shapes of it. With this book students are able to make real life connections to shapes and would be perfect for a math introductions into shapes.

[Tanika · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gives children the opportunity to point out different shapes in everyday life. They can see what shapes make up certain things like the shape of hangers, design of a sidewalk, and more. This would be a great activity for students to do in their own classroom, around the school, even at home or outside. They can pick out the shapes they see.

[Karelle Royal · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book of shapes.
Wordless picture book with wonderful, bright pictures.
Art: can have students use specific shapes to create pictures.
Math: this was used as an introduction to a math lesson on geometric shapes by my professor & it was a very engaging activity.
This book shows that shapes are all around us because everything is made up of simple shapes.

[Jennifer Berg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book for children, grades K-5, to utilize during their geometry units. I would recommend that students explore this book independently or in pairs, to spot shapes on each page. By providing your students with post-it notes and shape stickers, to identify the shapes on each page, this book can easily be turned into an excellent math center!

[Andrew Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is perfect for showing students that there are shapes all around us. There are no words or story but instead there are vivid pictures of objects/places in real life that are composed of different shapes. This will really help students make that text-user connection because every students can recall or even point out real world examples of shapes/geometric ficgures.

[Chelsea Bucci · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great book for grades K-1st. The writer encourages readers to look for shapes everywhere! This would be best incorporated during a geometry lesson when students are learning how to recognize specific shapes. It also activates their prior knowledge because they see many of the objects in the book at their home and even outside.