Preschool Parenting – Learning Lessons As We Go

Destiny baby is three years old now. He’s active and adorable, but there are times when he can be bored at home and we have to figure out ways that he will continue to be entertained, stimulated and continue to learn. We’ve picked up some ideas from books and other resources for teaching toddlers.

We’ve also made up some activities that came to us as we needed. This post is an opportunity to share what we’ve learned and what works for us. (This year has gotten off to a busy start and it’s taken a while to get this post together. Hope you enjoy it! – Mama Destiny)

We’ve divided them into types of activities–indoor and outdoor. This post starts with indoor activities. A future post will cover outdoor activities. As far as inside fun goes, one of the best things you can do for your child is to read a picture book to them, particularly a preschool or prekindergarten aged child who is working on literacy. Reading is one of our son’s most favorite things.

We also look for websites that have online games or him to play. Our little one has become very proficient at playing learning games online. He plays Nick Junior, PBS Kids, even games through Cartoon Network. Their website has games based on the cartoon shows featured on the network (While I’m writing this, he’s actually excited to hear me say each of his favorite cartoons). We bookmark those sites.

The cool thing is that he’s seen us use the keyboard since he was a little baby. He’s grown up knowing the computer and loving to use the keyboard and the computer. In fact, we had a post last year where we compiled a big list of our favorite sites for online educational games.

We’ll have to update it to include the new ones that that we’ve been using, but Literary Center is still a favorite. As Destiny Baby has become more or him more capable with the computer, he’s expanded to play other games.
So far, we’ve covered picture books and computers. Another favorite indoor activity of ours is puzzles and floor games.

Especially good for little hands are the giant floor puzzles and floor mats. When we were out in Los Angeles, we went to the La Brea Tar Pits (home to real live ongoing prehistoric dinosaur excavation pits–a great place for a family outing by the way) gift shop. They sold these wonderful giant floor puzzles of dinosaurs and my son loves dinosaurs. They are a great learning activity in terms of pattern recognition and figuring out shapes and recognizing what goes together and it even help his a dexterity. So that’s another favorite thing we like to do.

We’ve also invested in a set of paints and paintbrushes and art tools, chalk and crayons. At Wal-mart, we found a very affordable all-in-one chalk board and whiteboard, easel that we keep in his room. Sometimes he will wake up and grab one of the large chalks–it’s important to get large sized crayons or chalk for those small fingers–and start to draw whatever is on his mind.

Also posted on his bedroom wall is a set of ABCs. One big thing we’ve learned is that there’s always this emphasis on capital letters in baby and chilren’s learning toys. But =if you think about it, small or lowercase letters are more common and there’s not enough emphasis on that and we find that all of a sudden he’s being given reading and writing activities at preschool, when he hadn’t been really exposed lowercase letters. So we always make sure that any alphabet posters or books that we bring to him now feature upper and lowercase letters.

The easel has been great. Sometimes he will just draw free flow whatever he likes, and that’s important for learnin. Other times, we can direct his activities by pointing to his alphabets, numbers and shapes on the wall and say okay, draw that.

There are other fun things we like to do indoors. One activity happened because he had to come up with Valentine’s day gifts for his preschool class. Being new parents, we didn’t realize that there is this whole industry of kid’s Valentine cards that are sold in stores featuring cartoon characters and he actually got a lot of those kind of premade Valentine’s cards featuring cartoon characters kind of like little mini cards and those were really cute. However, we didn’t know about those and so we spent the day making by hand Valentines Day cards for all his friends–all twenty-something of his classmates and teachers.

That actually turned out to be a fun activity, because while mommy was cutting out the shapes, we also had glue and Destiny Baby was able to glue pictures of hearts and fun drawings on the construction paper Valentine’s Day cards. We also gave him crayons to color, that it became a fun kind of group activity for all of us to do.

Because of preschool, he really likes to participate now, and now whenever I make pancakes he joins in to help out. I always have him help with stirring the batter. When it’s time to cleanup he helps to sweep the floor and to pick up things put them in the trash.

All of those are all fun things that we do as primary indoor activities. We also just mess around the light, you know being that my son is only child. We have to be the big kids and play with them. We’re also his playmates say we do engage in pretend play a lot of times he just desperate to play on his own, which is great, but we do also engage in pretend play with. So all in all, we have crafts puzzles pain pain writing play in reading him or I’ll among the some of the main things that we do. We play indoors with with destiny baby.

The next time we’ll continue this series by talking about outdoor activities that were elected it will hopefully do give you some ideas to spark your own creativity!