Tag: Preschool

Dear Reader,

Kids love sensory activities, and today our rice trace was a winner. All the kids wanted to join in, so it made quite a mess. It may have been better had I had a tray for each child though.

This activity is one that was suggested by my child’s therapist and teachers. It helps them get a tactile feel for what they are learning, say letters or shapes.

All you need for this activity is rice (or sugar, or some other substance) and a tray. I used a small cookie tray I had, but you could use a bigger one or something similar.

Place your rice in the tray and spread it out evenly. Help your child learn the shape you want them to trace, then let them start tracing.

As I said earlier the kids loved it, but be prepared for a mess. They weren’t very good at keeping all the rice in the tray.

Dear Reader,

I know this activity is an oldie, and let’s be honest, all the pictures you see of it involve happy faces that are much more… shall we say, photogenic? But, my preschooler has a mind of her own. And I love that about her. She was so excited to get to use glue, though. When I set up the noodles and the plate, she was excited; we could have been doing about anything and it would have been a hit.

Naturally, knowing that I would be taking a picture, I wanted to show off some cute happy face that I can proudly instagram. But I’m not raising an instagram kid. I am raising a real kid. One who will understand that all emotions are good and serve a purpose. So when she chose a sad face, and I quote, “because she likes sad faces,” I didn’t try to change her mind. Its her plate. So, it’s not your typical, “look at what my kid did!” post. But we had fun.

She made hair, eyebrows, eyes, a nose, and a mouth. I put the glue on for her. Eventually, I’ll trust her to do it herself, but not yet. It went way faster than I expected. I asked her if she wanted to add more hair or if she wanted to make another, and my little busy girly was ready to move on, so we saved the rest of the noodles for another activity and moved on. I’m sure it’ll be a good boredom buster, but it was so fast, that I feel like it didn’t entertain her for very long. Maybe it seems to take so long because it’s usually an activity done with more than 1 kid? If we do it again, maybe I can convince her to do a happy face, eh?

Dear Reader,

Today I really wanted to focus on letter recognition with my preschoolers. They know their numbers really well (both can count at least to 20). This activity would have been perfect for that, had my toddler not interfered.

My preschoolers loved it, what we were able to do. They were able to take turns and grab a letter. Then the toddler, who is working on turns, just kept bringing random letters thinking it was her turn. Soon it turned into utter chaos.

I would say the idea was definitely better then the execution on my part. I think it would have been a lot better, and they would have had more fun with it, had I been able to distract the toddler.

The idea for Dump Truck Alphabet is to have letters spread out on the floor, give the preschooler a letter they had to get, have the preschooler drive the dump truck to the letter and bring it back.

I happened to have some fabric letters that my sister made me for the kids, but if you don’t have something like that you could always use letters that you make out of paper or something to that effect. Also if you don’t happen to have a dump truck you could use a basket or something to that effect, maybe an Easter basket. If none of those options work then you could just have them grab the letter and bring it to you in their hands.

Whatever you decide to use, I know you and your kids will have fun.

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.

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