Tag: activities

Posted on

How to Stop Spring Break from Breaking You!

It’s Spring Break season! If your kids are anything like mine, the sudden lack of structure has them going a little bit wacky. On top of being out of our normal routine, our Spring Break has felt more like Winter Break, especially with the 2” of snow currently on our lawn. 

Since outdoor activities are a bit limited at the moment, we’ve had to come up with our own fun! I thought I’d share some ideas of things to do in case your Spring Break isn’t going how you had planned. The best part of these activities is that they involve learning or practicing skills in some way, but most of the time your child won’t even notice it’s a learning activity! Win-win!

  • Coloring pages- the internet is full of free printable coloring pages for any interest, age, or skill level. Or, you can click here and download the freebie I posted last week!
  • Easter Egg Match- cut out several plain white egg shapes and decorate them however you’d like. Then, cut them in half using different kinds of cut lines (zig-zag, wavy, scalloped, etc.). Spread them out and have your child match up the halves. 
  • Alphabet Match- On a large piece of paper (even the back side of wrapping paper will work!), write all the letters of the alphabet (choose either lower case or upper case). Next, on 26 different small pieces of paper or sticky notes, write the letters in the case opposite of what you wrote on the large paper. Put each paper inside a plastic Easter egg. Hide the eggs around the house, and as your child finds them, have them open it up, find, and tape the correct letter match on the large paper. Other options for this activity would be to match numbers, shapes, colors, or pictures. It is easily adapted for any age.
  • If weather permits, take a walk around the neighborhood. Before you go, create a simple list of things to find while you are on your walk. Take your list with you and do an outdoor scavenger hunt while you walk. Mark off the items on your list as you find them. 
  • Do some themed days! Have all activities and snacks tie to your theme. Learn about your theme, if applicable. Possible themes might include Disney, insects, colors, letters, or a specific place.
  • Make and deliver a treat and card to someone in your neighborhood who might be lonely or need some cheering up.
  • Create a spring time mosaic— draw a simple spring-themed shape (Easter egg, bunny, flower, etc.) on a plain white piece of paper. Cut up pieces of varying colors of construction paper into small squares. Have your child glue them onto the traced shape, covering the whole space. Cut out the shape and enjoy your child’s masterpiece! 
  • Think of different simple objects that can be built from Legos or other building blocks. Write them on small cards. Have a building competition where you pick one of the cards and everyone has to build whatever is on the card. Have fun seeing the different things your kids (and yourself) come up with! 

Hopefully your Spring Break is less winter-y than ours has been, and hopefully you’re able to find at least a few minutes each day to slow down with your kids and have fun. Use one or more of these ideas to inspire some fun, creative play and watch the magic happen! 

Posted on

Valentine’s Day Fun: Preschool Edition

A few days ago, a photo memory popped up on my phone from a few years ago of my older kids doing a Valentine’s themed activity. I remembered it being a lot of fun for them, and remembered it being super easy to set up. I tucked the memory back into my mind, thinking that if I had time in the next few weeks, I’d set it up for my preschool aged kids. Well, as luck would have it, neither of those kids have school on Mondays, and we were all going a little stir crazy yesterday, so off to the craft store we went, returning with a pack of pipe cleaners. A few minutes later, my kids were happily playing!

The concept is simple: form several pipe cleaners into hearts and toss them in a pile on the floor. Give your kids some different objects that they can use to pick the hearts up— things like straws, plastic forks, tongs, chop sticks, popsicle sticks, clothes pins, etc.— and watch them go! Having them simply pick up the hearts is the most basic task with this activity. There are also many other variations, such as:

  • Assign a color and have them work on only picking up that color. Provide papers that match the colors of the hearts and have them sort the hearts onto the pieces of paper. This is great for color recognition and matching.
  • Have them transfer the hearts from one place to another. This helps with hand-eye coordination.
  • After they pick up each heart, have them create a pattern. Early math skills are in play here as they figure out a pattern to make.
  • See how many hearts they can fit onto their pick up tool, without any falling off. They can count their hearts once their tool is full.
  • Have them stack their hearts as they collect them, seeing how tall their stack can get before falling over.

As I watched my kids play with this super simple activity, I got thinking about some other activities I have done in the past when my older kids were preschool age. Most of these activities can be set up with little effort, and require materials that you may have around the house (or can buy for very cheap at the dollar or craft store). 

Pipe Cleaner Beading

Give your child a pipe cleaner and a handful of pony beads. Have them put the beads onto the pipe cleaner. This encourages fine motor hand-eye coordination. They can also create patterns, count their beads, and name colors as they go. 

Paper Heart Sort

Using whatever paper you have on hand, cut out hearts of varying sizes and colors. Have your child sort them from largest to smallest, smallest to largest, or by color if you have more than one color of paper. Again, kids can count hearts, make patterns, and recognize colors as they work through this activity.

Valentine Necklace

Cut a heart out of craft foam or felt and attach a piece of yarn, ribbon, or string of some kind. Give your child a bunch of pony beads and have them make a necklace. As with other activities, this one also allows for kids to work on small motor hand-eye coordination, counting, patterning, counting, and color recognition. 

Another great thing about these activities is that they are practically mess free! There’s no cutting, gluing, or coloring. Sure, the beads could spill, but that’s about the biggest mess that could come from all of these activities! Pro-tip, though— if you do the bead activities, have your child sit on the floor. That way, if the beads do spill or drop, they aren’t going to bounce all over your kitchen floor.

Not only are these not very messy, they are also great activities for promoting several learning skills and coordination skills. And, as a bonus, mom or dad might get a little break for a minute while the kids play and learn! 

Let us know in the comments if you use any of these with your kids or class!

Posted on

Why You Shouldn’t Feel Bad About Canceling Extracurriculars #TeacherMom

A bouldering class sounded like the perfect idea. As a former rock climber myself, what could be better than getting my adventure-loving daughter started early?

But then the class got pushed back into a more hectic territory for our schedule. As we tried to rearrange schedules and manage dinner and arrange transportation, I suddenly realized: it was more than ok for us to just drop it.

Here’s my highly scientific equation for why:

Stress of making activity happen > benefit of activity = CANCEL regret-free!

There’s already enough hustle in our lives just to keep things running smoothly.

Which is why extracurriculars are having to meet an increasingly stringent set of requirements at my house:

  • kids must be able to walk or bike there (which means I don’t have to play my least favorite role of taxi, we get exercise, and we help our air quality. Win-win-win.)
  • cannot compete with meal times (I’ve found that it’s way too slippery a slope for me to be like, yeah, fast food is fine just for now…)
  • must have a compelling reason to take kids away from free play time (which is at least as valuable as the vast majority of extracurricular activities). See #BeTime video below:

Yes, the bouldering class would have been fun. Yes, we probably could have made the schedule conflicts work for a while.

But life is made of all our decisions for today. I’d rather stop putting off when we’ll live exactly the way we want to, and start doing that right now. And that starts with eliminating any activity that doesn’t carry its weight. No regrets.

featured image: DeathToTheStockPhoto