Free Preschool Activities

I promised you some easy craft ideas you can do with your preschooler. Here are some that are good for older preschoolers, and also toddlers.

Parents of very young preschoolers (1 -2 yrs) often wonder how they can do crafts with their children. Those little people have a lot of energy, but don’t crafts with your toddler can be a lot of fun for both of you, and help your toddler learn how to follow instructions and develop hand-eye coordination.  When you work with toddlers, you’ll need to adjust your expectations. They have short attention spans and they’ll need a lot of adult help.

Here are two craft ideas that are fun and easy to do with preschoolers of any age.

Craft Stick Puppets

Puppets are fascinating to toddlers. Creating their own puppets is easy, and it’s lots of fun. All you really need are some craft or popsicle sticks, construction paper, safety scissors, markers and glue.

Help your toddler cut animal shapes out of construction paper. He can draw faces and other details with washable markers. Glue the stick to the back of the shape, let dry, and he’s ready to put on a puppet show. If you want to make more elaborate puppets, try cutting shapes out of foam. Glue on a pom pom for the nose, and add some googly eyes.

What I love to do with these, is help the toddler tell a simple story with the new characters she just created. Or read a favorite story and have the toddler’s puppets participate.

Paint with Pudding

Kids love to fingerpaint, but it’s so messy. And there’s also the concern about them eating the paint. Even if the paints are nontoxic, it can make cautious parents uneasy. The solution? Let them paint with pudding!

You don’t need different flavors to make different colors. Just use one serving of plain vanilla pudding, divide it up into small portions, and add food coloring to create various shades. Give your child a paper plate to use as a canvas for his masterpiece. When he’s done, he can eat it with no worries.

If you’re working with older toddlers or preschoolers, you can even help them mix the pudding. My kids loved that!

Tomorrow I’ll have some more easy craft ideas for you and your preschoolers.

There are so many more ways to have fun in the garden than just growing plants and flowers!

Here are some more activities you can do in the garden with your preschoolers at home or with or your preschool class.

Make plant markers.  The kids can draw pictures of the flowers or vegetables, and you can write the names on the markers. It’s a good way to help them start reading, and they can also learn the names of flowers.

Make homemade planters out of milk cartons, coffee cans or empty yogurt cups. The kids can paint or decorate them anyway they want. If you have a dayhome or preschool class, you can even let them take seedlings home in their planters.

Decorate your garden by adding a rock edging. Let your preschoolers paint rocks and place them around the garden.

Make a rain gauge to measure rainfall. It probably won’t be exact, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a good way to help your preschooler learn his numbers, and show him how numbers can be used in real life. Add markings to the inside of a container to measure the rainfall.

Add a birdhouse to your garden! You can buy a kit at a craft store, or make your own.

Make a scarecrow to keep the birds away, and keep your preschoolers smiling. Fill up some old clothes with straw, use a bucket for the head and paint a funny face.

As promised, here are some of my favorite flowers to grow with preschoolers.

Marigolds.  This is an inexpensive annual plant that can be found in your local garden center or nursery. They bloom almost continually, and are bright and cheerful. Easy to grow, marigolds do well in moderate soil and full sunlight.

Butterfly Garden. Look for butterfly garden seed at the garden center. All the flowers in this mixture are attractive to butterflies. Spend the summer watching butterflies dance through your garden! Use in conjunction with teaching your preschooler about butterflies.  You can leave out pieces of orange for the butterflies to eat during their visit. Or you can mush up fruit for a butterfly feeder.

Sunflowers. Sunflowers are easy to grow, and fun to eat afterwards.

Sweet Peas. These grow quickly. A fun project could be to make to teepee from bamboo poles, then plant sweet peas to grow up around the poles. Preschoolers can enjoy their garden and they get a cool place to hide.

Nasturtium. These bloom in the summer, grow quickly and make excellent hanging basket plants. The flowers attract butterflies and hummingbirds. Consider creating a nasturtium basket and hanging it outside a window where your preschoolers can watch the butterflies and hummingbirds visit.

What’s your favorite flower to grow with preschoolers? Leave a comment and let me know!

Gardening with preschoolers can be a pain… or a fun time for everyone!

Here are some tips to enjoying gardening with your preschooler this year.

• Give them their own garden plot, so you don’t need to worry about them mistaking your prize winning tomato plant for a giant weed!
• Let them grow things they like to eat - peas and carrots are good choices.
• Buy preschool-sized plastic gardening tools.
• Put on sunscreen and a hat before you work in the garden.
• Help them make labels for each row they plant, so they’ll remember what they planted. This is also a good way to help them learn to read.
• Decorate the garden! Help your preschooler collect and paint rocks to sit among the rows and keep your preschooler company
• Plant a pizza garden! Tomatoes, onions, green peppers, basil, oregano, etc.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about my favorite flowers to plant with preschoolers.

It’s still too cold in Calgary to grow plants outside. In fact, we built snowmen over the weekend!

No matter what the weather, you can always help your preschooler learn about plants by visiting a local greenhouse.

If the greenhouse isn’t very busy, you may even be able to talk to one of the employees about the different plants and what they need to grow.

Today we talked some more about vegetables and we did an easy paper craft.

Learning about vegetables can sometimes help a picky preschooler become more interested in trying new foods. It’s worth a try, but if your preschooler is anything like my daughter, don’t count on it!

For this activity, my students traced templates I made beforehand and cut them out of construction paper.

Then they glued green crepe paper leaves on the top and made some lovely looking vegetables.

If it’s still cold for you to grow things outdoors (or even if you can!) your preschooler can watch things grow indoors too.

Here’s a hanging carrot basket you can make with your preschooler. Water and watch it grow!

What You Need:

carrot

toothpicks

string

What You Do:

Cut off the pointed end of the carrot.

Hollow out the remaining end with a sharp knife. Here is what ours looked like:

Making the carrot into a hanging basket with toothpicks and yarn, so it looks like this!

Water the end that’s pointing up, and watch it grow!

I’ll post more photos when our carrot hanging basket starts growing.

The weeping birch tree in my front yard has grown almost taller than my house! It doesn’t have leaves yet, but you can see the tiny buds where they’ll soon be. My preschoolers know trees need water to grow, but they want to know how such a big tree can get water to its leaves.

Here’s an experiment that shows preschoolers how a tree can get water to its branches and leaves.

What You Need:

6 - 8 inch stalk of celery

2 glasses or jars of water

2 colors of food coloring

What You Do:

Put the food coloring into the water, so you have a different color in each glass.

Split the celery stalk about halfway up from bottom, so it looks like a celery stalk with legs.

Place one of the “legs” in one glass of colored water, and the other “leg” in the second glass of colored water.

In a few hours, the tubes and leaf veins in the celery will take on the color that was in the glasses.

What You Learned:

Water moves upward in the stems of plants and trees. The same thing happens in trees. That’s how my big tree can get water to all its leaves, even the ones at the very top!

Oh the weather outside is frightful!

In Calgary anyways. It snowed over the weekend! Hopefully it’s nicer wherever you are.

But my calendar tells me it’s spring, and that’s got my green thumb itching to grow something!

I’ve settled for talking to my preschool class about plants we eat.

Here is the lesson we did today. This lesson will help your preschoolers learn the parts of a plant, and where the food we eat really comes from.

What You Need:

Note: You can prepare materials on your own beforehand, or enlist your preschool child to help. It’s good practice for cutting with scissors, and could be a fun activity to do together if you have time!

5 Cardboard squares - I use 6″ squares

Pictures of vegetables cut from magazines or newspapers

Colored yarn or cord

A picture of a plant that shows the roots, stem, leaves, seeds and flowers. You can draw one (or your child can). This should be larger than your pieces of cardboard and other picture you found.
What You Do:

Place the picture of plant on a table.

Place a piece of cardboard on either side of the flower

Place the remaining 3 cardboard pieces on the top of the plant picture.

Connect the pieces of cardboard to the flower picture with the pieces of string: Attach one piece to the root, one to a leaf, one to the stem, one to the flower, one to the seeds.

Now, look at the vegetable pictures you cut out of magazines. What part of the plant did they come from? Paste the pictures on the appropriate piece of cardboard.

Here are some examples:

Flowers we eat: cauliflower, broccoli

Stems we eat: celery, chives

Leaves we eat: spinach, chard, lettuce

Roots we eat: radish, carrot, beets

Seeds we eat: corn, nuts

Conclusion: Some of our food comes from different parts of plants.