Where shapes come to life.
A story-driven geometry collection that turns every shape into a personality, a pattern, and a piece of the world children already live in. Cirra Roundling rolls her way through her day. Squibby Quibble marches in a perfect parade. Trixie Tri-Topple gets tangled in her corners. Shapes stop being abstractions and start being characters children spot everywhere.
Every book in this collection is already written. They are now moving through the longest part of any picture book’s journey: illustration, design, formatting, and production. Joining the waitlist guarantees you the launch announcement, the bundle preorder option, and the free starter resource the day each book is ready.
This collection helps children recognize shapes as part of the world around them, not just figures on a page.
Spatial reasoning predicts STEM success better than verbal IQ. It begins with shapes a child can play with.
Most children meet shapes on flashcards, trace them quietly, and then never see them again until geometry class warns them to. Shapetastic Shenanigans was built for something different ~ a world where shapes show up as characters, get into playful trouble, and show children that the built world is made of friends in disguise.
Children begin to see shapes everywhere ~ the windows, the pizza, the stop sign, the stars. What once felt flat becomes full of personality and possibility.
Parents and educators gain a vocabulary for play ~ ‘can you find a triangle?’ becomes a walk around the block instead of a flashcard grind.
Families and classrooms discover spatial reasoning as joy ~ building, noticing, arranging, and rearranging become natural parts of learning, not skills that have to be forced.
Synaptic density peaks at age 2, then begins selective pruning. The connections used most often survive. Stories, songs, and conversation decide which connections stay forever.
Spatial reasoning predicts STEM career success better than verbal IQ, math grades, or even early test scores. It is the most under-taught literacy in modern early childhood, and the most important one nobody is talking about.
Architects, surgeons, engineers, and designers share one childhood trait: they noticed shapes longer than their peers. They played, they wondered, they fit shapes together in stories long before geometry class.
Shape vocabulary in preschool is the strongest single predictor of geometry confidence in middle school. The kids who fall in love with shapes early are the kids who solve hard problems later. We are giving every child that head start, through mischief and rhyme.
In the 1990s, Dr. Sheryl Sorby at Michigan Tech noticed that engineering students who failed visualization tests in their first year were leaving the major in droves. She designed a 12-week intervention: students drew, rotated, sliced, and folded shapes in their minds and on paper. The results were so dramatic the National Science Foundation expanded the program nationally.
Sorby’s follow-up research found something even more important: spatial reasoning is the single biggest predictor of who pursues and succeeds in STEM ~ stronger than verbal IQ, math grades, or test scores. And it is teachable. The earlier you start, the larger the gains.
“Spatial skill is a learnable literacy. Most schools just don’t teach it.”
Dr. Sheryl Sorby · Michigan Technological University
Architects, surgeons, and engineers all share one childhood trait: they noticed shapes longer than their peers. We are giving every child that head start.
Spatial reasoning is the most under-taught literacy in modern early childhood. Here is how each adult can help.
Spatial play is free, ancient, and three minutes a day matters.
Adding 5 minutes of spatial work daily measurably moves the needle.
You think spatially every day. A child watching you spatial-think is a child being trained.
You are often the first to see spatial-processing differences. You are also the best-equipped to address them.
Every Shapetastic story is engineered, deliberately, around the principles of Sorby’s intervention: rotation, transformation, perspective shift, and mischief that requires the reader to picture what is happening in three dimensions.
A child who has spent 50 evenings reading Shapetastic books has done 50 mental rotations, 50 perspective shifts, 50 attempts to picture what a shape would look like upside down. That is the Sorby intervention, hidden inside laughter, before kindergarten.
We are not trying to raise engineers. We are trying to keep every child’s spatial brain alive long enough for them to choose.
Eye contact during read-aloud activates the same neural systems as language learning itself. Looking at the book together is part of the lesson, not the wrapper.
Over time, children start spotting their shape-friends in the wild ~ and the built world begins to feel less mysterious and more meet-able.
Shape vocabulary in preschool predicts geometry confidence in middle school. We are building it through mischief.
The Science Behind the Stories
Each shape becomes a character with a name, a face, and a personality all its own. Circle. Triangle. Hexagon. Ellipse. These aren’t flashcards or geometry drills ~ they are entry points into spatial awareness, symmetry, and the secret patterns hiding in the everyday world.
Stories show the shape doing its real work ~ rolling, stacking, tiling, fitting, tipping, bouncing, and showing up exactly where its corners and curves belong. Children see how shape makes the world work, one shenanigan at a time.
When shapes show up in real life, children finally have friends for them. They can say “look, a whole family of Hexagons!” or “that roof is a Triangle on a vacation,” and suddenly noticing becomes naming ~ and naming becomes the first quiet muscle of geometric thinking.
Additional materials designed to support and deepen understanding beyond the story.
Every book in the series comes with companion resources designed to deepen understanding and spark conversation.
Hands-on activities that reinforce learning through drawing, writing, and creative play.— one per book.
Thoughtful prompts that help children connect each story to their own experiences and environment.
Conversation starters and context for adults to guide children through each story's themes.
Character cards, Quotes, & Coloring Sheets that help the lesson land and last. hese are included in the Paid for Activityy Packs.
As children engage with these stories, they begin to notice shapes and patterns in the world around them. What once felt abstract becomes something they can see, understand, and use.
— A stop sign stops being a sign and becomes an Octa-friend.
A slice of pizza becomes Trixie’s best pose.
“When a child looks up at a rooftop and says, ‘that’s a triangle!’ ~ the whole world has changed shape. Geometry is no longer something to pass. It’s something to notice. And noticing is the first step toward understanding.”
~ Maisel McLaula
This collection was built for the adults in a child’s play life ~ the ones who stack blocks on the rug, who point out the moon’s circle on the drive home, who want spatial reasoning to feel like a game instead of a grade. Each story is grounded in early-STEM research, shaped by movement and humor, and told with the warmth of someone who has watched a child build a castle out of cushions and call it by name.
Whether you are the parent who builds the train track for the 200th time, the preschool teacher who lets the puzzle stay out for a week, the OT who teaches a child their hands can think, or the engineer-aunt who showed a kid what shapes can do ~ thank you. The adult who plays on the floor builds the architects, surgeons, and inventors of tomorrow.
Hands-on play activates 7 brain regions simultaneously. Worksheets activate 1. The floor IS the curriculum, in early childhood. You knew that already.
You are giving a child permission to think with their hands. That habit, once formed, never leaves them. Decades from now, they will still be the kind of person who picks up the puzzle.
Subscribe to the NextGen Learners Newsletter for stories from Maisel, behind-the-scenes peeks at upcoming books, free printable surprises, and the occasional very gentle reminder that bedtime stories are still the best technology ever invented.
“What a child learns to notice early becomes the world they live inside, forever.”
Children who play outdoors regularly show measurably stronger executive function, focus, and stress recovery. Nature is one of the original classrooms.
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The brain, brought to life as a cast of characters. Every behavior finally has a name, a face, and a reason for showing up.
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