For this activity, we used toilet paper rolls, pipe cleaners, and straws to create our very own structures. Given the many shapes that these building materials come in, they were the perfect tool for hands-on learning about basic math concepts: shape, size, area, geometry, measurement, and equivalencies. While playing with the toilet paper rolls, your child naturally began to sort them by a particular attribute, such as shape and size. He may have noticed that short toilet paper rolls made much better bases than the longer ones, or that the straws need to be bent in order to fit inside the holes.  This exploration into the nature of shapes prepares your child for later geometric understanding.