Posts Tagged ‘Preschool’
Toddlers love digging through things. Kitchen cabinets, boxes of blocks or my daughter’s favorite the DVD drawer. I roped in that inherent desire to dig and find for this love themed Valentine’s Day Discovery Box. Besides the silk flower petals inside there are paper hearts and family photos of people she knows and loves cut into hearts. As we played I’d ask her to find someone and she would search and search until she did. Great for families like ours that are spread out, or for any that are separated due to work or deployment.
- Gather your materials. You will need a container, some silk flower petals, printed card stock, double stick tape , family photos and a heart paper punch.
- Start by punching out paper hearts. The reason you want so many is that you want the toddler to pick each up and look on both sides to see if there is a picture. If the ones without the pictures over frustrate your child remove them. This builds concentration and memory.
- Cut out your pictures and using double stick tape stick them to some of the paper hearts.
- Add them to a container with the silk flowers.
- Add a toddler. She loved finding pictures of her brother as a baby the most.
- If they get up keep playing yourself, it doesn’t mean the activity is a flop they might just want some goggles… I had a hard time not laughing hysterically when she put the goggles on. She was happy and moved the box to the floor so maybe she was just more comfortable on the floor. I ran with it.
- Label things as you go but don’t interrupt too much, be there to help along not to direct.
My Toddler’s Favorite Valentine’s Day Book
Where Is Baby’s Valentine?: A Lift-the-Flap Book
I can’t tell you how many times I have read this book since I brought it out of storage after Christmas. Countless. Every time we sit and lift the flaps together I get a serious craving for chocolate. Karen Katz is a toddler’s dream come true. Her illustrations are big and bright and filled with happy babies. Her text is short but still meaty enough for young preschoolers and the flaps to lift and open are perfect for this age when a static book often is just too static for a dynamic toddler. I can see why my daughter brings it over to me everyday. It’s the perfect book to go along with this activity and you could even slide a few of the hearts with photos under a few flaps while you read.
by Kim
We talk about emotions a lot in our house. When you foster, it kind of comes with the territory and makes things a lot easier to have open communication. So I am always trying to come up with new ways to talk about emotions and feelings with my children. Enter my “emotional snowmen”. They are drama queens (even worse than my 3 year old daughter).
To do this activity all you will need are toothpicks, marshmallows, and food markers. These markers are completely edible and can be found at craft stores. I purchased mine in the cake decorating aisle of Wal-Mart. They were around $5 and we use them on all sorts of stuff. I highly recommend them.
Take two marshmallows and stick them on a toothpick. Be sure to leave enough of the toothpick out to attach another marshmallow.
Have your child draw a snowman face. You can open the dialogue by asking them how their snowman is feeling today. When they tell you, you can ask them to draw a face that shows Mommy how they look when they are _________.
My snowman was feeling silly. We made many different types of faces. We talked about things we do when we are feeling the way each face looked. We also talked about what we can do to help change our moods.
Then we acted out each mood and emotion.
Each child had one snowman body and then different heads to change out.
This is such a great ice breaker for new children or just getting your children to open up to you. Sometimes young children have trouble processing and understanding the emotions they feel. This activity really helps them, plus it is perfect for the colder weather.
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.
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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