Category: Kids Need Play

Dear Reader

Have you ever heard the song “One of these things is not like the other’s, One of these things just doesn’t belong.”? That is what inspired this game. The great thing is that your kids will love it and you are able to sneak in some learning with it.

Being able to sort out the things that match and don’t match is a beginning math concept. I was surprised how well my preschooler was able to grasp this concept.

She could see that something was different between most of the options that I gave her, until I started venturing into the not so obvious differences. She could see that the cars were different than the little people angel, but struggled to grasp that the soft toys were different than the hard toys (this may have been my fault for using a stuffed horse and a plastic horse with the teddy bears).

My preschooler loved this game, and I got bored of it way before she did. She kept coming up to me through out the day asking to play again.

There are a lot of paper worksheets that have this activity for a child to do, but I figured, why not use what I have around the house? There are so many more options than the pictures give you. You could do colors, shapes, textures, taste.

In the end, I did enjoy doing it. I just suggest you have a lot of options gathered so you can just sit and play with your child. If you don’t you may end up running back in forth because they figured out all your choices in the first 5 seconds.

Dear Reader,

My daughter has really been struggling with scissor skills. It fits right in with all the fine motor stuff she’s been working on in OT. The fact is that if given the choice between big movements and small, this girly will choose big. And it goes further than movements. I’ve got an active, grand-movement-only type child. Nothing should be small in her mind. So slowing down and working on stuff she has to concentrate on is a major task for her. That’s why I looked up a list of scissor skills and made up scissor-cutting worksheets, and I’m working on a series of activities to use them.

From my fairly thorough internet research, scissor skills development includes:

1. snipping at the paper (cutting off small chunks)
2. cutting fringe (think the bottom of take a number papers. Or this activity)
3. cutting straight lines all the way through a paper
4. cutting zigzag lines all the way through a paper
5. cutting out shapes and objects
6. cutting out wavy lines

Please don’t count me an expert. An internet search doesn’t equal an OT degree. But I at least know we can work on those skills! So, I got to work creating the pages, and then we worked on making crafts with them. Today’s craft, as seen above, is a lion face. I made one with my daughter (you can see the difference in the skill level… at least I hope, haha), gave here a Styrofoam plate and a dry erase marker (I am sure it works just as well – if not better with a paper plate and washable markers, but we went with what we had) and showed her my example and she drew her own lion face. As mentioned above, she’s not big on small movements, so coloring is not her favorite thing. I think coloring on a different object than paper, and with a different medium, made it entertaining enough, but there is definitely a strong scribble game going on. And then, on to the part she wanted to do: Cutting the fringe mane.

After I cut the strips and she cut the fringe, I showed her how to curl the fringe. She had no patience for it, so we kinda did a few and then left it. Then, on to gluing. I found it easiest to glue the strips myself with liquid glue so that they got a little soggy and pliable before I handed them to her and had her put them around the plate. you need to curve/fold/bend them. obviously, because you’re working with a square paper and wrapping it around a round plate. Praise getting it on the plate because it’s harder than it sounds for preschoolers. Honestly, it was a challenge for me as an adult, so of course it’d be hard for preschoolers.

As far as skills, I’m pretty impressed. I mean I know it’s not “hey look at my super talented kid and what she can do.” but it was fun. And real. And she did pretty well for her relatively first craft. And I’m gonna do other similar projects because we need more scissor practice.

***Update: Since this article, we have created quite a few block activities and decided to make a printable dice game pack for you! Get that free download here.***

Dear Reader,

Today we played with dice. You can make your own, use what you have, or improvise with this one. To be simple all you have to have is a 6 sided die or two. You could make a list of six activities for your child to do, Or use an activity dice.

I made mine, but the girls had fun anyways.

The activity is pretty simple. First you start with rolling the dice (one for the activity and one for how many times you do the activity). Second you do the activity on the activity die the number of times it shows on the number die.

The activities can be simple, stomp your feet. Clap your hands. The possibilities can be endless, or as endless as your imagination ( I had to wrack my brains to figure out some and came up with some like do the cha cha.)

This gets your kids moving and you can even practice counting with them. A big bonus is that they usually like tossing the dice too.

My kids loved this for a while, then little sister wanted in and she didn’t know how to share. Cue crying. Oh well, definitely worth trying again.

Dear Reader,

I don’t know how it’s been for you lately, but my preschooler has been on one! She has been nagging nonstop and even yelled at her occupational therapist (we’re working on her pincer grasp. She struggles with fine motor skills. In my personal opinion, that is because everything she does is at 100 mph and she has no time to slow down and focus long enough to master said fine motor skills. This girl was born with a fire underneath her). I wanted to make an activity we could do together to hopefully reset the ‘tude she’s been dishing lately, so I made an activity that would hopefully let her slow down long enough and enjoy some time with me. I’m sharing it free with you (you’ll still need to grab a few supplies) in hopes that your kids will enjoy it, too. Scroll down to grab the freebie.

You’re gonna want to grab a few coffee stirrers (we call them hot chocolate stirrers) and save a milk lid for this activity, so plan ahead. But once you’ve gotten what you need, all you have left to do is to print out the page, cut the little figures apart (pretty important if your kiddo is easily distracted like mine. Not so important if that kiddo is older or less distracted), and sit down and build. I am pretty confident that an older preschooler would be able to enjoy themselves with little assistance, but younger kids definitely need some help figuring out how to move the pieces just right. It requires a bit of hand-eye-coordination and spacial relation. Bonus! This activity also works with the pincer grasp (we are becoming very familiar with those types of activities)!

Anyway, download the page and let me know how it goes!

Dear Reader,

Life has been rough here the last little while, resulting in my surgery the other day. I really needed something simple and easy to occupy my kids, and having a dance party is the perfect thing.

Dance Party is a favorite activity here. It gets my kids active and I can basically just put it on and let them do the rest.

I find YouTube to be the easiest supplier of dance songs, but if you have dance music CDs (I know, old school but I grew up with them so I still have a few lying around) or even a playlist on something you can use those.

As I said this is mostly a hands off activity but if you want to join in you will more than likely get your kiddos to do more dancing. It will also keep them involved longer if you are joining in and bonus you get some exercise too!