Summer has sure seemed to go both too fast and too slow. I confess that for me, even with Covid, it has gone too fast. I love summertime, and I love spending time with my family; working and playing together. Which is why we (my sister and I) decided that we wanted to become a little more on-purpose with our kids. We decided to start doing the activities – breaking them into activities for toddlers and activities for preschool – and to keep us a little more committed, to share them here, on my blog.
The first activity I did with my preschooler was to make paperclip jewelry. It was actually kind of fun, and I could see so many ways that it was a great learning activity. We worked on pattern skills, the pincer grasp, colors, and math, all in one activity. And it cost me nothing but time to sit down and build them with her. I had colored paperclips, which I highly recommend for this activity, but it would still be fun with the basic metal ones. With colored ones, though, you can work on colors and patterns. My daughter’s favorite colors right now are pink and green, so it should come as no surprise that when picking out colors, she went with those choices. I liked that she chose 2 because that gave us a great opportunity to work on simple patterns. She knows what patterns are but hasn’t really worked with them that often, and I feel like knowing the concept of something and actually using it are 2 different things, so it was good to put her pattern skills to use.
after I pulled out all the pink and green clips from my stash, we put them in order together. I’m sure we could have played with patterns longer, but she was happy with a simple AB order, and honestly it worked for me, so we went with it. then came assembly time!
It took her a little while to get the hang of connecting the paperclips, she kept sliding the whole clips through each other instead of slipping an end through a loop, but she figured it out, and it wasn’t that much trouble to help her. I had her count how many went round her wrist and it took 6 paperclips to go around her wrist. I don’t think she really cared, but it seemed like a good time to slip a little subtle math and measuring concepts in.
All in all, it was super easy, and we had lots of fun. she wore her bracelet all day while we were out running errands, and when we got home she wanted to take it apart so we could do it again another time. I think that it is definitely something we will do over and over again, because it’s not really hard to pull out the little plastic container of paperclips and put a few together.
