Age 5 and older
I use this activity to help my kindergartener son practice his spelling words. Because let’s face it, memorizing things isn’t fun for young children. Since my 3 year old daughter thinks she should do everything her big brother does, I adjusted this for her to practice her letters, numbers, and writing practice.
All you will need to do this simple activity are paper and crayons. That’s it.
I drew an upper and lower case A for my daughter and her friend. But we also did a couple of numbers and threw in some shapes, too.
Have your child trace the letter, shape, or number with any color crayon. As they are tracing it have them say it out loud, too. For letters we say the letters and then say the sound they make. For shapes we will say the shape and then say something that is that shape. You get the idea.
Have them trace over the object again with a different color crayon.
Then have them repeat it again with another color, and so on until all seven colors of the rainbow are used.
Our friends had a little trouble getting the idea at first, they wanted to draw another one next to the one I had drawn. But with a little bit of guidance they saw that it would make that one a rainbow and then they were eager to do it.
Now you have a rainbowed letter (or number or shape).
This is a very easy way to get your child to do repetition without making it seem like doing the same thing seven times. It is great for handwriting and pencil grasp practice, along with recognition of letters, shapes, numbers, and colors. It really is a lot of fun and your refrigerator will soon be covered with rainbowed objects. Just a warning.
Kim is a contributing writer for No Time For Flash Cards, a mom to a toddler, a preschooler, and a foster parent, too. She juggles her day by trying out fun activities and crafts with the kids. After all, she is just a big kid herself. See what she has been up to over at Mom Tried It.
When I suggested this idea to my son for the Tinker Lab Paper Bag Challenge he bolted to the playroom to start finding supplies. One problem his sister was napping and I’d worked hard to get her to sleep, I wasn’t about to wake her with the sounds of exploding bags. So we waited until this weekend and to say it was worth the wait is a total understatement. Our Love Bomb was fun to do and the end product was even cuter than I thought it would be.
- Gather your materials. You will need some paper bags, scrap construction paper, a canvas or heavy paper,contact paper, white glue, scissors and/ or a hole punch.
- Start by cutting your scrap paper into small pieces.
We used scissors and a hole punch.
- Pop them in the bags. We made 3 bags with a handful of confetti in each.
- Make a heart with contact paper.
- Pop the heart on the canvas. spread glue all over the canvas. Make sure there is lots along the edge of the contact paper. Forgive the photos, my camera dove to the floor on Friday and my new one hasn’t arrived yet. Thank you apple for my iPhone camera!
- Time for some confetti explosions, you might want to do this outside.
- Blow it up
- Smack it as hard as you can. It took us a few tries and we practiced earlier.
- Bam! Some of the confetti will fly out but you still have to give it a little shake to get it all.
- After all have been popped, gently push the confetti that are on the heart to the edge. Let dry for only a few minutes then peel off the heart.
- Let dry over night.
Pretty cool right? We had so much fun, just hearing the giggles that emanated from my son was enough to do this again and again!
Check out the other creative uses for paper bags at Tinker Lab.
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Chinese New Year is almost here and today we made a Chinese dragon to celebrate the year of the dragon. When I suggested we make a dragon today my son said ” Okay but it has to be huge!” My request was that it was a project that we could all do together. I also wanted a longer project since we are stuck at home in the snow and needed a long project to break up the at home day.
- Gather your materials. You will need some craft ( butcher block) paper, red, yellow and green construction paper , green paint, a rolling pin, cutting board, potato masher ( optional), scissors, glue, bubble wrap and a googly eye. Oh and painters tape to hold it down while you create.
- Start by taping the paper down and draw a dragon. I free handed the dragon and while perfect it’s not , I am trying to model effort not perfection for my kids and we are focusing on making something fun, not something perfect.
- Using the construction paper make triangles for spikes on the dragon’s back and head, long strips of red and orange for fire . If your child is cutting make some long strips with guided lines or blank strips thin enough for them to hold and cut easily. My daughter isn’t cutting yet but she still enjoyed ripping so I made sure some of our construction paper was in strips the right size for her to rip and even made little rip to get her started. Set these aside for later.
- Wrap bubble wrap around your rolling pin and grab a potato masher – both will give a reptilian like print when your child uses them to paint.
- Spread the paint on a cutting board .
- Roll and paint.
- They were both into it. I moved my daughter’s booster around to different parts of the dragon and my son moved around the table painting and printing.
- She loved the rolling pin.
- Let dry – I popped this up in my bathroom to dry while we played , went out in the snow and had lunch.
- Rip
- Cut
- Add glue
- Add the spikes!
- He had fun with the fire .
- Let dry and cut out.
- Hang up and celebrate the year of the dragon!
Books About Chinese New Year
D is for Dancing Dragon: A China Alphabet
My First Chinese New Year
Bringing in the New Year
My son loved the 3D Word Search I made him a while back so when I saw that the dollar store had pink and purple foam letters I grabbed a few packs and headed home to make another for him. The great thing about this activity is that it incorporates different senses . Kids can see and feel the letters that make up the words. I kept the words easy to find by making them all a uniform color for my beginning reader but make it as tricky as you want. Also even if your child isn’t reading you can still make this , just turn it into a letter search .
- Gather your materials. You will need a canvas or other stiff cardboard base, contact paper, foam letter stickers , scissors and a marker. Depending on which contact paper you get you will want to either use a dry erase marker or a regular washable maker if you want to use the word search as a write and wipe surface. I bought a new type of contact paper this week and dry erase is a pain to wipe off it, but washable markers do great with a baby wipe. If you want this to be a one time only activity you can skip the contact paper and just add the letters to some construction paper.
- Cover the canvas with contact paper- this makes the surface wipe able.
- Add your words. I tried my best to stay lined up but I never worry about it being exactly perfect. I took words from classic conversation hearts but you can do any thing , even names of people you love. I find it easiest to add one row vertically and one horizontally first then fill the columns in .
- Write the words out on some paper .
- Add a marker and a kid and watch them amaze you with their skills!
As my son was doing this I noticed he touched the letters, squished them and traced a few with his hand. My cuddly guy ( he’ll hate that I said that in a year or two) seems to have a real need for kinesthetic elements in his lessons.
- I also noticed how he was holding his marker, after I took these pictures. He has a natural tendency to twist his wrist like that for cutting but it’s the first time I have witnessed it for writing. Not sure if it was just because of the raised letters but I am going to watch him much closer … Any tips of correcting this ? Experience with this particular tendency? I am going to have him write on the wall more ( forces proper grip) but if you have any other awesome ideas please share !
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Teaching children about racism, prejudice and diversity isn’t easy. We are told that kids don’t see color but they do. Kids aren’t colorblind they just don’t have the societal baggage behind the observations that they make. It’s okay to notice differences, it’s ok to ask why someone has a funny hat or why someone’s eyes look different from theirs, it’s not ok to hate or to treat people differently because of the differences we notice and that is the lesson I set out to teach my son.
On Friday night I told my son the story of Martin Luther King Jr. , his amazing dream and tragic death. I showed him a video of the march on Washington and he heard Dr. King’s amazing address for the first time. I am so glad he got to see it before he got a chance to read it, nothing compares to seeing the original footage . I love the internet and that I could show him that snuggled in a dark bedroom on my iPhone.
Many questions were asked and the next day we sat down to make these paper dolls. We talked about how they were holding hands just like the children in Dr. King’s dream .I know that the very best way to teach children to avoid prejudice, embrace diversity and fight racism is to lead my example but for a hands on experience this was a fun way to reinforce your everyday lessons .
- Gather your materials. You will need a sheet of paper, scissors, crayons in various skin colors, markers in various colors of eyes and hair and a bright red one for lips. You will also need a 2nd piece of paper and 3 containers. You will also need some heart stickers, or cut out hearts and double stick tape.
- Start by fan folding your paper .
- Cut the paper dolls by cutting out the body shape , leaving the arms connected by the fold. If your child is able have them do the cutting, this would frustrate my son to no end and stop the lesson in it’s tracks so I took care of it and had it ready for him.
- Write out all different combinations of physical attributes,
cut out and place in the 3 containers. I did light, medium and dark skin. Blonde, brown, black and orange ( red) hair , brown, green and blue eyes. 
- Welcome your child and explain how people are all the same on the inside. We added hearts to each person with double stick tape – although stickers would be perfect. If you make larger dolls and have a child with a longer attention span you could even add more of what is inside people both the physical and less tangible things like love, hope and dreams.
- Flip over. Start drawing each physical attribute.
We did random drawings to show that no one chooses their outsides, it’s random and only our shell not our heart. Color the skin, hair and eyes which ever color you draw from the containers. 
- We had fun making predictions and taking turns drawing the skin, hair and eye color and coloring the dolls.
- I loved the end result of 4 unique looking people connected to each other on one side
and 4 connected hearts on the other. 
We have been talking a lot about celebrating our differences but connecting to our similarities and this craft was a wonderful exercise in it.
Books
Whoever You Are 
The Colors of Us
Little Blue and Little Yellow
If you are looking for a great books about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I highly recommend My Brother Martin by Christine King Farris for children 5 and older. For younger children The Story Of Martin Luther King Jr. by Johnny Ray Moore is fantastic .
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