Let's Explore - Creative Activities for Preschoolers

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, crackers, pretzels, cereal, chocolate chips, etc.) and dice.  Roll the dice and count out that number of the first snack item into your bowl.  Roll again and count out the second item.  Keep rolling till you have all the treats in your own personal snack mix.  Sometimes, we even count the total amount of snacks before we eat.  Still hungry?  Do it again!

Have fun!

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 a place to be stored, so we made labels (cardstock + clear contact paper) for divided bead containers and the girls have been happily filling them with their treasures.

Besides the simple fun of collecting these treasures, I love to use the girls' collections to practice counting, sorting and describing.  We can sort by size, color, shape, texture.  We can count our treasures and put them in groups of 10.  We can write about our favorite item in the collection and why we like it.  Natalie has big plans to take a photo of each button and create a "catalog" with photos and descriptions of her entire collection.

I've been wanting to set up some "nature jars" too, where the girls can display assorted shells, rocks, sticks, etc.  Just need to find the right spot to put them (away from the puppy!).

Do your kids like to collect things?  How do you store or display your kids' collections?

Happy Collecting!

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 differences through sorting:

 

Things for sorting:

• Craft supplies: beads, buttons, colored paper clips, fabric scraps, pom poms
• In the kitchen: various types of cereal, pasta, beans
• Nature items:  rocks, shells, leaves
• Toys: small animals, legos, marbles
• Treats:  M&Ms, jellybeans
• In the garage:  screws, bolts, nuts, washers
• Other: coins

Sorting containers:

• muffin tins
• hula hoops
• small bowls, buckets, baskets
• yarn circles laid out on the floor
• divided trays or serving dishes
• empty egg cartons 
• ice cube trays 

Everyday applications:

• silverware
• laundry
• groceries
• toy clean-up

Sort and classify by:

• color
• shape
• size
• function
• habitat
• season
• texture     

sorting animals by water, land, + tree-dwellers

Happy Sorting!

Number Play: Estimating

An estimate is, very simply, a good guess. Working with estimations is a great way to play with numbers and work on those logical reasoning skills. My girls seem to love any thing that involves guessing and checking, so this was perfect for them!

We started with estimating how many cups of water it would take to fill a small pitcher. We used three different size cups for comparing. Starting with the smallest cup, we estimated, then filled the pitcher to check. My five-year-old guessed 10 cups (and was right!), while my three-year-old guessed 3,000 cups. As you can see, maturity and experience make a lot of difference in making reasonable estimations.

We continued on with a medium and large cup, discussing how our estimates should change. My older daughter told me, "These cups will definitely be less than 10 because they are a lot bigger!"

Our second estimation project was to see how many legos it would take to cover a book. The estimates were 34 and 100 legos. Actual result: 56 legos. Think of all the good counting practice we had checking our estimates!

Here's some more ideas for estimating fun:

How many steps will it take you to walk from the front door to the back door?
How many times can you jump in 10 seconds?
How many goldfish crackers will it take to fill this bowl?
How many blocks can you stack before the tower falls?
How many scoops of sand will it take to fill the bucket?

And, a great one for waiting rooms: How many babies/dogs/meals do you think we can find in this magazine?

Remember, this is all about exposing our little ones to the vocabulary and process -- it doesn't really matter how accurate they are with guessing or checking!

Happy playing!