Remember how I said I had a million excuses for why my goals have gotten off track?
Between pregnancy and some family moving in with us for the next few months, not only have my goals gotten off track, but my entire daily schedule was shot for a while there. Pregnancy means medication and barely moving for a while for me…extra people means weeks of chaos that finally settles into some semblance of normalcy. But I was feeling pretty useless and lame for not keeping up with our home preschool activities.
Finally, I watched Red try to write something, and his handwriting was getting terrible–with only a few weeks without practice! So that was my last straw.
Despite my beautiful wonderful calendar of activities, I decided something was better than nothing, and we started doing one thing a day, even if it wasn’t quite “according to schedule”.
Basically, I scoured my Pinterest board for things I could work on with the kids while sitting down, and we have had a BLAST doing all sorts of things! My 2-year-old nephew has joined our preschool crew for the while (we call him Squish) and it has been a load of fun.
Here’s some examples of literally-no-prep, fun things we’ve done!
There’s these marshmallow and toothpick structures:
Red constructed a huge grid with absolutely no help from anyone, Squish happily put together squares and triangles and a few cubes with some help, and the Professor (being very much my child….doh) ate more marshmallows than built stuff, but it was still a load of fun. I’m not kidding when I say this kept a two and four year old occupied for at least an hour and a half.
We broke down old crayons and made new, multi-colored ones:
This was actually way more of a fine motor activity than I expected! Since we had to peel all the paper wrappers off, they had to use their little fingers and nails to get it working, and, admittedly, they got kinda ugh about that after a while, but it was a good 15 minutes of peeling paper off and rearranging which crayons went in which muffin tins. Baked the crayons on my oven’s lowest setting (170 F) for 20 minutes, and voila! New crayons!
We made these cute bunny headbands:
(Printed off for free from Simply Kinder, which has a TON of great worksheets and things we love to use!)
Which turned into scissor practice:
And, as usual, we did lots of handwriting worksheets, reading books, and watching sight word videos! It has been such a great week of learning and I hope to keep up the momentum. Of course, I am super blessed to have my sister-in-law living here so she can manage dishes while I manage the learning time, so we have way more hands at our disposal than usual.
My point is, the schedule is great, but the learning is the most important part. Besides, so many of our unscheduled, barely put together activities stretched out into learning opportunities I hadn’t expected, like when the back of Red’s handwriting worksheet turned into an impromptu grocery list, with him sounding out words and then carefully writing them out.
Just keep giving your kids the opportunities to try new things, and they will soak up learning!
On Tuesday I’ll have more for you on our learning activity adventures: a free worksheet, straight from Education.com! I’m going to have a whole day of sight words and reading practice worked around it! Hurray!
What do you do to keep your kids constantly learning?
Comment below and let us know!
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