A Story of a Dot on a White Notebook

ABOUT THE BOOK
FAMILY ACTIVITIES

A Story of a Dot on a White Notebook

text and illustration: Gulnar Hajo

A dot on a white page gets bored and decides to move on the page creating different shapes and characters that construct a story. The play of colors between the black and white backgrounds and the colored dot gives this book a special artistic touch.

Family Activities

Video

Dear Parents,

The dots came alive and started to create lines, shapes and a whole world on a paper. A child is similar to the dot who comes to realize that there is a world full of lines and shapes, created by nature and human beings. The child learns about these shapes through his/her senses: by looking, by touching, by feeling them with his/her. Children look for shapes in their environment: the tree branch as a line, and the plate as a circle. Children can take a pencil and make a dot on a piece of paper, move it and see the line, and gradually can draw a whole unlimited world.

We share with you some book-related conversations and activities to enjoy with your children:

Family Activities

With a child, we can follow the dot’s “trip” on a piece of paper, and connect it to other dot that create shapes; we can play with the shapes to build house and human beings.
We can draw or stick several dots on paper, and ask our child to connect between them. Then, we can ask whether the dot could create such shapes if it stayed alone. We can have a conversation with the child about the importance of cooperation at home and at the kindergarten.
We can look for items at home or outside that are made of lines, circles, and squares – a carpet or the borders of a yard. We can catch the child navigate the child around as if he/she were a train among these different shaped items and ask him to call out what shapes we are passing (circle, square, triangle). We can also look for small shapes at home among the child's games that have simple geometrical shapes.
Build and dismantle! We can use cotton wool tips (the kind we clean our ears) to build unlimited number of shapes.
We can cut out squares, circles, triangles and rectangles, and ask the child to build shapes.
We can draw on a paper a simple shape (such as a circle, a square, a straight line etc…) and ask the child to imagine the things we can create from these shapes. We can have a conversation about what shapes are need to build an item the child thinks of, and help him/her to draw it.
Baked shapes! All we need is to prepare some cookie dough, create shapes, and add some sweets to decorate them. Enjoy!