Mr Men Shapes Busy Bag

By Adventures and Play TeamPublished: April 16, 2015Updated: May 19, 2026

The Mr Men Shapes Busy Bag is a small metal tin full of plastic linking shapes, a stack of hand-drawn sequencing cards, and a lining of blue felt with googly eyes glued to it. Three games come out of the same tin: sorting and matching shapes onto the cards, linking the shapes into chains, and placing shapes around the googly eyes to make faces. It started life as a quiet activity for the kitchen table and has since become the bag I throw in my handbag for waiting-room mornings. Ages 2 to 5.

A small metal lunchbox-style tin printed on the lid with the Mr Men book characters: Mr Strong in red, Mr Happy in yellow, Mr Tickle in orange, and several others in a tightly packed grid of bright cartoon faces. The tin has a red carrying handle on top. It sits closed on a plain surface, ready to be opened.

What you need:

  • One small tin with a hinged lid. A printed lunchbox-style tin works well because the lid pattern gives the kid something to look at while you take a sip of coffee. We used one printed with the Mr Men characters from a recent shopping trip.
  • A pack of small plastic linking shapes in primary colors. Squares, circles, triangles. A pack of around a hundred is the sweet spot. Each shape should be about the size of a postage stamp.
  • A small piece of blue felt cut to fit inside the tin lid, plus a second piece to line the base of the tin. The base lining muffles the metallic rattle of the shapes when the tin gets shaken in a bag.
  • A pack of googly eyes. About thirty pairs.
  • Super glue or a good craft glue for the felt and the googly eyes.
  • A handful of plain white or cream index cards. Around eight cards covers a full set of sequencing patterns.
  • A black fine-tip felt-tip pen and a small set of colored pencils or thin markers in the same colors as your linking shapes.

Setting up the tin

Glue the blue felt to the inside of the tin lid first. Trim it close to the edge so the lid still closes flat. Glue the second piece into the base. While the glue dries, take the googly eyes and stick them in pairs across the lid felt in a loose grid. About a dozen pairs across the lid is plenty. Leave gaps between the pairs so a single shape can sit cleanly around each one.

The inside lid of the metal tin lined with light blue felt. Across the felt, plastic linking shapes in red, yellow, blue, and green are arranged in a grid. Each shape (a square, circle, or triangle) has a pair of small googly eyes positioned inside or just above it, so each shape becomes a tiny face. There are three rows of mixed-color shape faces across the felt.

For the sequencing cards, lay an index card flat and place a shape on it. Trace around the shape with the black pen and color the inside with the matching colored pencil. Repeat across the card to make a four-shape pattern: red square, yellow triangle, red square, yellow triangle. Each card gets a different pattern. Mix the colors and shapes across the cards so each one teaches something slightly different.

Eight hand-drawn sequencing cards arranged on a plain background. Each card is a long index strip with a row of four shapes traced and colored in: yellow squares, red triangles, blue circles, and green circles, in different repeating patterns. The shapes are outlined in black felt-tip pen and filled in with bright colored pencil.

How a small kid uses it

Open the tin on a table. Take the linking shapes out of the base and tip them into a small pile. Hand the kid one of the sequencing cards. The first round is matching: find a shape that matches the first slot, place it directly on top of the drawing. Find the next, place it. Move down the card. A two-year-old gets the matching mechanic on the first card. A three-year-old finishes a card in under a minute and asks for the next.

A close-up of a single sequencing card with the pattern square-triangle-square-triangle drawn in yellow and red. Below the card, the same pattern is built physically with yellow and red linking shapes connected together in a chain. A second smaller card shows the same pattern repeated, with a row of detached linking shapes laid out beside it.

The second mechanic is linking. The shapes have small open hooks that join together. The kid pulls them apart and clips them back into chains, then puts a chain next to the card to compare. The chain-linking is where the fine-motor work happens. Pinching two small plastic shapes apart and re-hooking them is the same hand action as a button or a small zipper. It builds the muscle without being a chore.

For another shape-recognition activity that uses a different prop, our Learning Shapes With Toy Cars uses chalk-drawn shapes on a patio with a small basket of cars. For another quiet table activity in the same age range, our free animal coloring pages set covers cute and detailed animals for younger and older toddlers.

A small toddler in a T-shirt printed with cartoon cars and trucks sits at a small table. He is concentrating on a sequencing card on the table in front of him, picking up a linking shape from the open tin beside him to match the pattern. The lining of the tin is visible behind his hand with more shapes spilling out.

The third mechanic is the googly-eye faces. Open the lid and turn it toward the kid. The shapes go around the eye pairs to make tiny characters. A red square around two eyes is one face, a yellow circle around two eyes is another, and so on. Adam noticed this on his own about ten minutes into the first session, dropped the sequencing card, and spent the next half hour making faces and then taking them off and making different ones. The same shape over a different pair of eyes felt like a new character to him.

A small toddler at a table reaches into the metal tin and lifts out a linking shape. The tin lid is open and shows the blue felt lining with rows of googly eyes glued across it. Several shapes have already been placed around eye pairs to make faces. The kid is mid-action, focused on the next shape.

A Pinterest-style image titled 'Sequencing Mr Men Shapes Busy Bag' in black handwritten font on a white background. Three photos are stacked: the top shows the inside lid of the tin with googly-eye shape faces in red, yellow, blue, and green; the middle shows a toddler at a table reaching into the open tin while a row of sequencing cards lies on the table; the bottom shows the open tin from above with a full set of sequencing cards laid out beside it.

One closing observation. The Mr Men tin was the part that took us the longest to find. Any small hinged tin works. A square cookie tin from a charity shop, a school-lunch tin from a thrift store, even an old biscuit tin with the label peeled off. The Mr Men cover gave Adam an extra thing to look at on the lid and a small story-prompt before the activity even started, but the activity itself does not depend on it. If you find a tin with any cartoon faces on the lid, the googly-eye-faces game gets a little more meta in a way a two-year-old appreciates without being able to explain.

About The Author

Our team of illustrators, writers, designers, and editors works together to craft original, family-friendly coloring pages, printable activities, and simple creative tools for home, classroom, and library use. Each page is thoughtfully created, then reviewed for clarity, accessibility, and quality before it goes live. Adventures and Play has been a small creative corner of the internet since 2017, and since taking over the site in 2025 our team has grown it into a free library of printable coloring pages, an online coloring tool, and a printable maze generator — alongside a careful refresh of the original blog archive of crafts, sensory play, and learning ideas. We're dedicated to making creativity accessible for children, parents, and teachers, with new designs and ideas shaped by what visitors actually use. Learn more about our story and the team on our About page. You can reach us directly via our Contact page or connect with us on our social channels.