Many parents are looking for learning activities for their preschoolers, but truthfully, play is learning for children. So many things that you would naturally do with your children or they would do on their own at this age is beneficial for their minds.
Play helps children make sense of the world around them as well as learn to regulate their emotions and interact with others. Connections are constantly being made in their minds as they engage in play. This is also a primary way for children to learn problem solving along with creative and imaginative play.
Without even realizing it, your preschooler is doing much more than you think!
Outside Play and Mud Kitchens
Children are naturally drawn to nature. They don’t need to be taught to explore and experience the things around them, they just need us to let them! Creating a safe environment for our preschoolers to play outside is so important. Not only is the fresh air so beneficial for their minds and bodies, but the freedom to roam, learn risk assessment and experience God’s creation will do them wonders.
Mud Kitchens are not a necessary part of outdoor play, but they do give a fun invitation to get hands dirty and play with what is naturally around us. Children also enjoy how it mimics what their parents do in the inside kitchen! Who among us didn’t love to make a potion with dirt and twigs in our younger years!
Next time you catch yourself about to scold a child for playing in the mud or getting dirty, remember it’s part of learning!
Puzzles
Puzzles provide so much learning without even recognizing it is happening! You can find puzzles with so many different skills on them such as matching upper and lower case letters, matching numbers with a pictorial representation, matching shapes, matching mother animals with baby animals, and the list goes on.
Not only is the content of the puzzle a learning activity for preschoolers, but the recognition of where pieces fit and the motor skills to fit them together is an important developmental step as well.
Puzzles are also such a fun way for children to connect and spend time with siblings, parents, grandparents, and other special people in their lives.
Imaginary Play
Playing pretend is something our children seem to be innately born with. Whether it’s playing house, pretending to be a superhero or a favourite book character, playing cops and robbers, or whatever else you can think of, this is a popular pastime for preschoolers.
While at first glance this may not seem like a learning activity, the benefits are meaningful. Here are some of the major benefits:
- Children learn about their own world and environment by pretending to be in other ones.
- They learn problem solving and conflict resolution during imaginary play with others.
- They have the opportunity to stretch their creative minds, which comes in handy in some many facets of academia later on.
Letter Hunt
This activity is just as easy as it sounds and adaptable to what you have in your house. Write letters randomly on chart paper or a white board or something hanging on the wall. Also write the same letters individually on sticky notes that you spread throughout your house. You could have them all in the same case or have them matching lower case to their upper case.
Send the child to find the ‘hidden’ letters throughout the house and return and stick them where they belong on the master board. If you have magnetic letters you could hide those and have them come and match them to letters on a paper you tape to the fridge or dry erase board.
This is such a quick and easy activity that children have lots of fun with. Add another element by having them say the sound as they make a match (or if they don’t know the sound, you say it and have them repeat).
Colour Match
This is another idea where you can really use your imagination as there are so many ways you could set up an activity like this. The idea is for the child to recognize and match colours, sorting like colours together.
One fun way to do this is to cut circles of various colours of construction paper to fit in the bottom of muffin tins (one colour per section). Dump out a bag of pompoms and have the child sort the pom poms into the corresponding colour of muffin tin. Make sure the construction paper pack and the bag of pom poms have the same colours!
If you want to add an extra challenge and bring in some fine motor skills, have the child use a utensil or other item to move the pom poms. Be creative in choosing the instrument — they could use a spoon, a kitchen flipper, tongs, tweezers, whatever suitable item you have handy.
A more active variation of this activity, which would incorporate gross motor skills, would be to put different whole sheets of construction paper on your table and floor and send the child on a colour hunt! They need to find things throughout the house that match the pages of construction paper you set out. Once they locate an item they bring it back and set it on the correlating construction paper.
Have some fun with different variations of this depending on what you have available to you at home.
Sensory Bins
Sensory bins can be created to practice many different skills depending on what you fill it with and what you want your children to do with it. The sky really is the limit. Some skills typically practiced through sensory bins are:
- Gross motor skills like scooping and pouring (also a fine motor skill);
- Sorting like items;
- Fine motor skills like pinching, beading, and digging;
- Matching;
- Imaginative play, etc.
Outside of the skills developed, sensory bins can provide a way of connection between the parent and child. Time spent together is so important.
Read the rest of this article for creative sensory bin ideas.
These ideas are just some of the many ways preschool children are learning through play. Though it may be difficult, try not to micromanage too much. Your child will benefit in various ways as they engage in free and unstructured play. Mix in some of these more structured activity ideas, but don’t fill their days so much that there is no room for child-led, unstructured, excitement-filled play.
Remember the words of Maria Montessori, “Play is the work of the child”.
Read more about learning at the preschool stage:
Teaching at Home: Preschool & Beyond
