Fun Preschool Activity: Having Share Day at Home

My daughter has always done share day at school (in First Grade, Kindergarten, and Pre-K).  It was one of the days that she looked forward to the most.  Although we live with our daughter and obviously know many of the items she has, we sill enjoy doing share day at home.  Her dad and I even pick an item to share.  We haven’t been doing share day as much as we used to, be it does happen at least one a month in our house.

Easy Craft Project: Foam Door Handles

I love foam craft kits; they are so cool!  They are also pretty cheap.  I bought these foam door hangers in a kit from the Dollar Tree.  The only cost was the door hangers; we decorated them with items we already had in the house!

Things You Will Need:

Foam Door Hangers
Glue
Markers
Stickers
Other Embellishments (Foam Shapes and So Forth)

Directions:

Step #1:  Gluing a bunch of embellishments on foam door hangers can get kind of messy when small children are involved, so first start out with putting newspapers down on the table.

Step #2:  Give each person (child and yourself) a door hanger.

Step #3:  If anyone wants to write their name, now is the best time to do it before the door hanger has a bunch of stickers and shapes glued on.

Step #4:  Start gluing shape cutouts and pom poms or add your stickers now.

Step #5:  It is best to let the glue dry before you try and hang this on the door or else all your glued embellishments may slide (haha speaking from experience)!

Decorating Sun Visors & Other Foam Hats

Browsing around my local Wal-Mart, I visited the craft section.  There I found a lot of cute foam hats for children to wear and decorate.  We purchased a few sun visors and princess hats.

These items make for a great, fun, and easy craft project for kids.

Supplies You Will Need:

Foam Hat(s)

Markers

Stickers

Glue

Other Embellishments (Pom Poms & So Forth)

Directions:

This craft project for kids is very simple!  Set a bunch of items in front of them, such as markers, stickers, and so forth and then let them go to town.  Watch as your child has fun decorating their own hat!

Painting Leaves: A Great Preschool Activity

If you are still able to collect a few leaves with your child, there are a number of preschool craft projects you can do with them. One is painting leaves.

What we did was take a sheet of paper and glue leaves to it. Then, my daughter painted the leaves.

Doing Craft Projects with Leaves

Pretty soon, the leaves will start falling. In fact, they have already started to do so here. What does that mean? The perfect opportunities for preschool craft projects with leaves. So, take your child for a walk, gather some leaves, come home and let the creativity flow!

Preparing Your Child for Preschool: A Fun Preschool Activity

Hat Day

Do you have a lot of hats in your home? You may. If so, gather all of the hats in your home, including baseball caps, sun hats, rain hats, cowboy hats, or whatever else you may have.

Next, have your family sit down and try each hat on. You can talk about the hat or makeup stories about it. For example, the person wearing a cowboy hat can talk about being the greatest cowboy in the west or the person wearing a baseball cap can talk about a homerun they hit in the last game.

This activity encourages your child to use their imagination.

Preparing Your Child for Preschool: Fun Activities with Wood Puzzles

In my last post, I stated three reasons why wood puzzles are great for toddlers and preschoolers. Another reason is the other activities that you can do with them. In addition to simply just putting a puzzle together, there are other games that you can play.

1 – Toss in a Basket

This preschool game works best if you have two or three wood puzzles. What you will want to do is set a small bucket or basket a little bit away from your child. Have them toss all of the puzzle pieces into the bucket. When that is done, set the bucket next to the empty puzzle holders. Have your child grab one puzzle piece out at a time and put them together correctly.

2 – Scavenger Hunt

You can hide a few puzzle pieces around your home. For ease, make sure they can easily be seen and stick to one room only, like your living room. Whenever your child finds a puzzle piece, have them put the piece together until the whole puzzle is finished. For harder hiding spots, give your child clues to find all of the wood puzzle pieces.

Preparing Your Child for Preschool: Neat Animal Webcams

The other day, I came across a website that had a few webcams for animals that were at the zoo. My daughter loved watching the animals on her screen. You can easily find more zoo webcams with a standard internet search, but these are the two that my daughter liked the most.

Shamu from Sea World’s Webcam – Click on Link at the Bottom of Page

Animal Planet’s Panda Cam

Preparing Your Child for Preschool: More Preschool Craft Project Fun with Collages

In my last few posts, I highlighted how making a collage with your child is a nice preschool craft project. In those posts, I also highlighted how it is easy to use pictures from magazines and store sale fliers. With that being said, you do have another option. That option is using photographs of your family instead. This approach is much more personal for children.

When letting your child make a collage using pictures of themselves or family photographs, be sure that you are using double prints, as you will not want to lose any valuable photos.

This preschool craft project option works best with digital photos saved on a computer. You can print off another copy for your child to use. The good news is that the quality of these pictures does not have to be perfect. In fact, you can print them on traditional computer paper, as opposed to photo paper.

Another great idea if you own a digital camera is to let your child take their own pictures to use in their collage. Personally, this option works great for us, as we have taken steps to show our daughter how to use and properly care for our digital camera. Pictures of the family are great, but pictures of things outside may also catch their eye.

Preparing Your Child for Preschool: Fun Preschool Activity

If you are looking for a fun preschool activity with your child, you may want to consider playing dress up. Dress up is a preschool activity that both boys and girls love!

In addition to simply playing dress up with your child, you can also incorporate a game of charades into the mix. This is something that we will occasionally do. For example, my daughter will act out riding a horse, but put a cowboy hat on. Of course, this makes the game much easier, but it also encourages your child to use their imagination and their minds to make a connection.

Preparing Your Child for Preschool: Scavenger Hunt

When looking to prepare your child for preschool from home or homeschool preschool them, you will likely want to play preschool activities with your child. If you haven’t already done so, you may want to have a preschool scavenger hunt with your child.

A scavenger hunt involves hiding a few items and having your child find them. This preschool activity can be done indoors or outside. For the best chance of success, you may want to choose items that are relatively large in size or items that are brightly colored.

When doing this fun preschool activity with your child, you can verbally tell them what to look for and give them clues. Another option that you have is a making a list for your child. We use this approach, as it also makes it seem like a treasure hunt. I will just draw what my daughter needs to find on a piece of paper, like a large red squared block, and so forth.

Preparing Your Child for Preschool: Playing Cards

One of the many ways that you can go about preparing your child for preschool or educating them from home is through the use of playing cards.

One of the many ways that we use playing cards is to practice numbers that are higher or lower than others. We do this by paying the card game war. If you are unfamiliar with this game, you spilt the deck up between you and your child. You then flip over one card at a time and the person with the highest card takes both cards. Most adults play until someone has the whole deck of cards, but you don’t have to do the same.

This is a nice, yet fun way to get your child started with learning their numbers, as well as math.

*** For some reason, I am having a hard time with my pictures; I can't get them to show. Lol, I am just hoping they will magically appear tomorrow.

Great Preschool Games: LeapFrog Bingo

In the picture above is a game that is known as LeapFrog Bingo. In all honesty, I purchased the LeapFrog Bingo game for my daughter as a Christmas present, as it was on sale, but it is one of the best purchases that I have ever made.

The LeapFrog Bingo game is played in our house at least three days a week. It is very fun and exciting, even for me! Although slightly similar to traditional bingo games, the LeapFrog Bingo game encourages your children to learn their colors, their shapes, their numbers, animals, and beginner math skills.

The box of the LeapFrog Bingo game says for ages three and up. We actually opened this game on Christmas morning and we all played it. My daughter was almost, but not quite three and had no problem playing it all, once she got the hang of it. Five months later she is now in control of the spinner!

Play Dough: Great for Writing Skills

The other day, I had a meeting with a woman from a local preschool program. We were talking about my daughter and how she is learning to read and write. The writing part she wanted to do on her own, as she just started tracing all the letters.

Anyways, the woman that we were meeting with asked if she played with building blocks or play dough when she was younger. She did. She explained to me about how they say children that play with play dough and building blocks are likely to have an easier time with writing, at least when they first get started with it. So, if you haven’t already, you may want to think about breaking out the play dough.

Flash Cards + Rewards = A Happy Learner

Yesterday, I mentioned how flash cards are a good start, when looking to start educating your child from home. The flash cards themselves are pretty new and exciting, but as time wears on, you may need to come up with some ideas to keep your child interested in learning with them. For this, I recommend stickers.

What we do is buy those little sticker books, the ones that tend to have like 500 or so stickers in them. Some of the stickers are really small, but there are also some larger sized stickers in the books. What is nice about these types of stickers is that they are available in many dollar stores. I can always find a large selection of sticker books at my local Dollar Tree.

We would start out by taking a piece of construction paper. My daughter would choose the color that she wanted and I would write her name at the top of the page. Every time that my daughter would get a flash card right, she would get a sticker. She would then place her sticker on her paper.

A little bit more than a year later, my daughter still loves learning with her flash cards, especially if she gets her stickers!