Preschool Activities
Are you looking for preschool activities? Your toddler is growing, and while you might not be ready to send him off to preschool, you want him to have the benefit of whatever pre-K activities other children his age might be doing.
Preschool activities should always be fun for you little one—at this age, forced ‘schoolwork’ is only counter-productive. If you introduce your personal daycare activities as something fun and exciting, your child will love to do them. It’s all in the billing.
Types of Toddler Preschool Activities
Preschool activities are little activities you do with your child to encourage his learning and exploration. They can include:
• Learning songs and rhymes
• Learning the numbers & counting
• Learning the alphabet
• Working on fine motor skills
• Looking at picture books and listening to simple stories
• Playing simple games like Ring Around the Rosies
Visit my pages on toddler games and toddler books to find more about those topics. Here we’ll look at preschool songs & rhymes as well as pre-K activities you can do to help your child learn his numbers and letters.
Preschool Singalong
Sing with your child whenever you’ve got a moment waiting in traffic, when you’re waiting for the microwave to warm up dinner, or even just when the two of you are on the floor playing with blocks. Choose a few toddler songs to start with, and when your child has learned them and is able to sing along with you, add a few more to the repertoire. If they have actions, all the better. A fun one:
Open shut them
Open shut them
Give a little clap
Open shut them
Open shut them
Put them in your lap
Creep them, creep them
Creep them, creep them
Right up to your chin
Open up your little mouth
But do not let them in.
Learning the Letters
Learning the letters can be a slow, gentle process; your toddler has lots of time to learn. Print out or draw coloring pages for your child, with big letter outlines that can be colored in. As you give him the pages tell him what the letter is; it’s often best to focus on letter sounds rather than letter names with preschoolers.
Flashcards are another fun way to work on letters. You can get letter flashcards inexpensively at most general stores. Choose two or three cards to work on at first. Tell your child what the first one is—“Look, Annie, this is A”, and then put it with the other two and ask her “Can you give me the A?” Once she is able to do that easily, introduce the second “And here is a B” Play games in which she finds the letters and hands them to you, and applaud her whenever she does it right. Go slowly; you have all the time in the world.
Make letters out of play dough and tell your child what they are. Again, go slowly; start with only one or two, and make them the same letters that you are working on with flashcards.
Counting Activities
Teaching counting and numbers to your toddler is best done in the context of everyday activities. Count when you clean up toys; count when you break eggs into a bowl for breakfast. Tell your child how many places you’re setting when you set the table, and ask him to bring you two shoes—or one sweater-- when it’s time to go out for a walk.
You can also play low-key flashcard games, using flashcards that have pictures of one, two, three and four objects on them. Ask your child to find the card with three smiley faces, the card with one smiley face, the card with two smiley faces.
Have fun doing preschool activities with your toddler! They’ll only be little once.
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