From the category archives:

Learn

Shape Collage

Step 1: Surprise your young artists with a tray of colorful paper shapes.

Step 2: Make sure the glue is handy. Stand back and let the creating begin!

Step 3: Ooh and aah over the shape-inspired masterpieces.

The girls spent a good amount of time creating shape pictures over the weekend, and have continued [...]

I’ve written about these before, but we love making our own board games out of file folders. You can check out my ideas and examples for these easy DIY games over at Blissful Kids today!
Happy playing!

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Roll-a-Snack

When the pantry starts to fill-up with various odd and ends of crackers, cereal, raisins, etc., we like to dump it all together into a yummy snack mix. Sometimes, we even make it into a game – a little math with your snack!

I call it Roll-a-Snack. All you need are various snacks (nuts, dried fruit, [...]

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Collections

My girls love to collect and gather. There is always a pile of sticks and rocks at my front door. There’s usually a bucket of little animals traveling from the house to the car and back again. They each began focusing on collecting a certain item – buttons for Natalie, rocks for Delaney. Collections need [...]

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Let’s Sort!

I don’t know about your kids, but mine *love* to sort! They are both naturally driven toward making groupings of similar objects, lining them up or making little piles. Sorting is not only fun, it’s also building those important early mathematical and scientific reasoning skills. Here’s some of the easy ways we explore similarities and [...]

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Bingo!

My girls LOVE to play bingo! We make our own bingo games — sometimes I make them on the computer, other times we print out a blank grid and we use seasonal stickers for the pictures. We play bingo with letters, numbers, rhyming words, shapes, money, holidays, etc. Practically any skill you [...]

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Fun With Magnetic Letters

Magnetic letters are fun for making words on the fridge, of course, and a great hands-on way for little ones to explore letters. Here are some more fun ways to use magnetic letters and work on those pre-literacy skills:
Hide & Seek

Hide a few capital letters around the room. Give your child the lowercase [...]

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Kinder Prep: Name Play

For your preschooler, learning to write his/her own name is not only important, it is a very satisfying confidence-booster. Here are some ways to make it fun! For most of these activities, it is helpful to write your child’s name on a large index card and laminate for durability.

Put salt, sand, or cornmeal [...]

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