Activities While Home!

In light of recent news, many parents, across the country, are working from home, and trying to find ways to keep their smaller children engaged at the same time. We wanted to put together some activities, which we’ve come across over the years, that can keep the learning on while at home!

Sticker Line-Up
This simple activity uses white butcher paper, and dot stickers. Roll out about 3 feet of the white butcher paper, and then draw a combination of zig-zag, curly, loopy, and swirly lines down the paper.

The goal of this activity: to focus on fine-motor skills, tracing, counting, and patterns

By doing this activity, any toddler or preschool-age child is not only engaged for a good amount of time, but we’re able to talk about colors, shapes, patterns. A parent can start the patterning by putting down certain colors down, and then explaining to the child what to do next.

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Sort & Drop with LEGO Bricks
This is a nice & simple activity which I had come across during my teaching years. And the materials are also items you’d find around the house: easel paper, packing tape, box, knife, scotch tape, colored sharpies, and LEGO bricks.

I had found an Amazon box, and covered the top with the easel paper and taped the paper in place. Once you cover your box, make five squares into the top of the box and taped the edges around squares so that they don’t easily rip. Finish by outlining each square with a different color!

Now it’s time to get your Toddler, Preschooler or Pre-K child up and around the house, having them search for all of their LEGOs. Then sit with them and ask them to find the red LEGO and drop it into the cut out of the red square. As you do this, you can discuss the shapes and sizes of each one. Use words/phrases like “bigger than” or “smaller than,” when talking about the different LEGOs.

Once done, you can always turn this into an extension math project, and talk about graphing! Dump out all the LEGOs, and then count how many of each color are there. You can use this graph paper, to color in the number of squares for each color LEGO there is. And by doing so, the children are able to visualize, in a different way, which colors were “more than”, or “less than,” the other.

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Golf Tee Push
For any busy child, keeping them actively engaged is a task in its own. But this activity only takes seconds to do, and it’s a great one which focuses on fine-motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and spacial awareness.

Find any old box, and add a few holes into it. Give them the golf tees, and allow their independence to flourish! Once all the tees have been put into the holes, you can discuss math by counting the number of tees he/she was able to push, and then also color recognition. If you have an older child at home also, join them into the fun and have them discuss quantities, and practicing writing the colors and numbers.

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Money Hunt
This activity is perfect for your Preschooler or Pre-K child! You can use real coins if you like, but we suggest to use this – so even if they get lost (or stuck in the sofa), it’s not a big deal 🙂 Place the coins out in a plastic tray, which you can find at the Dollar Tree or may even have at home! then cover the coins with fun (colored) rice; (this is yet another great activity you can do also!)

Now give your child some useful “tools,” so they can look for their treasure! Some of these will also play into fine-motor skills, depending which items they choose to use when searching.

As the children are searching and finding coins, they can sort the into smaller containers. (Sorting = math!!!)

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Vibrant Colored Rice
This is something a child, of any age, would have a great time doing! For this simple activity you would need white rice, hand sanitizer (fruit-scented is nice!), a few toothpicks, and then mason jars! I would also suggest that if you’re doing this with a Toddler or even Preschooler, to use a funnel. Inside the mason jars, add a few squeezes of sanitizer, then added gel dye, and toothpick.

Fill a larger bowl with rice and then ask your child to pour about 1 cup into each. (For your older child, you can discuss measurements and quantities as well!) Close the jars tightly, and then let your child shake everything up. You will see that the color is spreading onto the rice inside the jars.

Once all the jars are mixed together, you can pour then onto a baking sheet and make a beautiful rainbow, and then slow transfer it into a sensory bin, so they have this to use for quite sometime!

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If you work on any of these at-home activities, we would love to see your child in action!