Homeschooling: Teaching shapes to toddlers and pre-schoolers

Salam,

I'm actually not a stay at home mum and do work(as a teacher) .As a teacher, I work with older kids, so toddlers and pre-schoolers are my personal experiment at the moment. I do believe teaching start at home, though i do hope not all parents decided to home-school cos I would be jobless otherwise.
I do not rely on school to teach my children, but prefers to educate them myself. I do believe a lot in audio,visual and kinesthetic learning. My children and I are probably more keen on kinesthetic, which is a lot to do with our sense of touch and feel. We have been working on shapes for a while now, and my 3 year old pretty much recognises different shapes. I was trying to find ways to teach her remember how many sides does each shape have, and while thinking about it an idea came to my mind when i saw her playing with pencils.She was trying to build 'things' with the pencils. It was brillant, just what we needed, so we started making shapes using the pencils, and within minutes she and her younger sister remembered the number of sides each shape has. They were counting the number of pencils they would need to make a shape, in order to know the sizes.
But, this simple shapes lesson turned into much more with their help. It helped them with counting the number of pencils they would need, and also with the concept of 'too many' vs 'too little' when choosing how many pencils they would need.  Furthermore, my 3 year old, who has been working on small /smaller; big/bigger etc made the shapes and analysed which ones were smaller/bigger and why she thought so by counting the number of pencils used and how much space it took on the floor.
My youngest, who is still learning to count used this exercise to work on her knowledge of colours. She tried to remember which pencil in the shapes were of what colours. She knows a lot of colours, but sometimes struggles to tag the right colour name with the shade.
I really enjoyed this exercise with them ,and would say they were they were the ones leading me on through out.
We have also incorporated making shapes in our exercise routine, whereby use parts of our body to form different shapes while exercising, and since we've introduced this, this seems to be my 3 year old favorite exercise routine.