We started homeschooling our daughter when she was 14 months old. She had been so keen and curious that we decided it was the right time to start some organized early childhood education in our home. We plan to homeschool when she reaches school-age, but we thought, “why wait?”. I’m always trying to think of educational activities that our little one would enjoy and I’ve come up with a few fun activities that she loves. I wanted to share a few of the quick, easy and cheap activities that we’ve done so far with all of you, so enjoy!
LEARNING STICKS
We have SO much fun these – I think they are my favourite thing that I’ve made for her preschool (can you tell I’m a school nerd mom?). These were so cheap and fun to make. We call them her “Learning Sticks” and she loves when we bring these out. In addition to what you see in the photo, we also have sticks with our home address and phone numbers.
I picked these colourful jumbo popsicle sticks up from a local dollar store and they were only about $1.50 for the whole package. There are plain wooden ones too but I thought these would be more fun.
I just grabbed a regular black Sharpie that I already had at home and used that to draw the alphabet, numbers from 1-10 with corresponding dots, family member names (including her full name on the back of hers so she can get used to seeing that as well), home address and phone numbers.
This is such a simple activity – who knew popsicle sticks could be educational?
One way I’ve used these in a learning activity is by pulling the sticks out one by one and then asking her to identify what’s on them. She knows most of her letters and some numbers and if there’s any she doesn’t remember or hasn’t caught on to yet then I will read it to her and get her to repeat it to me. Repetition is really key in learning!
We also love lining the sticks up in a row like in the photo as an activity and I point to them and ask her to say all of the ones that she can remember in a row…then of course, she loves to mess them all up afterwards, haha!
Once she gets a little older and ready to start learning words then we can line the sticks up in a row to play some word recognition games.
Have you heard enough about how fun teaching with popsicle sticks are yet? Ok, I’ll stop.
LETTER CARDS
Seriously. All you need is a computer, cardstock, scissors and a printer for this one. I just typed out a whole bunch of the same letter in different colours and then printed the pages on cardstock. I used my handy-dandy guillotine paper cutter (scissors obviously work fine too) and sliced them into mini letter cards. I also printed out one large letter to match the letter cards (see her playing with the letter A set in the photo). You can do this for every letter in the alphabet and pull out the sets at different times or play some mix-and-match activities. We have mostly kept them separate and just worked on the letters individually at this point. She loves putting all of the letter cards on top of the large printout.
One of our favourite activities to do with the letter cards are going on ALPHABET HUNTS! I will hide all of the letters around the room and then tell her to go and collect them all. She gets SO excited when she finds a letter and she brings it back to me and then goes to find another one.
One huge tip that I learned at an early childhood education conference that I once attended was that when playing any game or activity with children is to always stop at the peak of fun. That was actually my biggest take-away from that conference, to be honest. Basically, don’t stop an activity once a child is becoming bored with it — stop it after they’ve had a chance to play for a bit but they are still having a lot of fun with it. If you stop an activity while they are already “over it” then it’s not going to sound exciting to them the next time to try to facilitate it. If you stop while they are having fun, they’ll be sad for the activity to end at the time but excited when you bring it out next time!
I found that the letter cards (alongside other teaching tools) were really helpful in teaching her the alphabet and by the time she was 18 months old she could identify most of her letters. At this point there is only a handful that she needs a little help with.
I plan to make a set with numbers on them as well and do the same sort of learning activities!
diy Mailbox
We were at my brother’s birthday dinner when this idea came to me. He received a new pair of shoes and I immediately said “Oh, I want that box for a mailbox!”. I got a couple of funny looks by my childless siblings but my mom thought it was a great idea, haha! The next day, my husband used a utility knife to create an opening in the box for me and I let my daughter decorate it with stickers. I added the foam alphabet stickers to the front that you see in the photo but she’s since removed all of them and I opted to just write “MAIL” on the front with my trusty black Sharpie and decorate it up a bit with my classic heart and flower doodles.
I’ve been adding a new alphabet flash card to it every couple of days. She gets excited to receive new mail and then wants to practice putting all of her mail in and out of the box. She will sit and do this activity for about 10-15 minutes quietly before I take it away (again, make sure to end the activity before they lose interest!). This activity is great for enhancing fine motor skills and for recognition activities (you can put any type of cards in the box – shapes, colours, numbers, letters, etc.).
We also like sitting together and as she pulls a flash card out I will ask her to tell me what’s on the card. She will proceed to tell me which letter it is (if she knows it) and what the images on the card are. She is so proud of herself as she pulls each card out and she really loves this activity.
I also glued some small blank greeting cards together (so they can’t open up) and she likes putting them in as well!
I plan to expand on this as she gets older – we will likely get a new shoe box that she can draw and colour on as I’m sure this one will be covered in stickers by that time.
ALL the colours
I didn’t buy anything at all for this activity. All I did was find a bowl in my cupboard and went around my house collecting random objects (toys, plate, measuring cups, etc.) to match the colour of the bowl. I’m one of those people with a lot of different colour serving bowls so if you don’t have many you might want to pick up a few different colours you can use any container to store the items and not worry about the colour as long the contents are the right colour for the lesson.
My red bowl was full of red objects in this specific activity and my baby girl was thrilled to play with everything. I sat her down on a blanket on the floor and put the bowl in front of her. I let her explore all of the contents for a couple of minutes and then I got her to help me put everything back in the bowl. We started pulling everything out again individually and I pointed out the different objects and exclaiming that they were “RED!”.
After she became familiar with the objects in the bowl, I took a few of them and placed them around the room and asked to go find the red items and bring them to me. She eventually brought all of the right items back and each time she brought me an item that wasn’t red I made sure to tell her what colour it was (ie. “Oh! You found a green ball…we are looking for red toys”) and I would set it aside and not place it in the bowl. Only the red items would go inside the red bowl.
We have also done this activity with multiple colour sets out at once and I would have the different colour bowls beside each other in a row. I would hide the different colour items around the room and ask her to put them in the right colour bowl. She needed a lot of guidance with this because she is still learning her colours but there are a lot of great teaching moments as you navigate through these activities!
ANimal identification
I love using stories from the Bible and creating different learning activities that connect to the story. For this particular lesson, we were studying the story of Noah’s Ark so we did an animal identification lesson. We have also done a lesson on colours of the rainbow along with reading the story but I don’t have the photos of that one.
First, we read the Noah’s Ark story (Little People edition, of course) and afterwards I set the book on the couch and I told my little one that we were going to try and find as many animals as we could to match the animals in the book. We would look at the book and if I knew we had that animal somewhere in that room or around the house then I would point that one out to her to look for.
She loved looking for the animal toys and was so excited to see that each one matched an animal in the book. While looking for the animals we would practice animal sounds and saying their names together. Once she found an animal, I told her to place it on the couch beside the book and then we would be off to find more.
We have done this activity another way as well where I would set up the animals and the book ahead of time and when we were ready to start that activity I would point to a stuffed animal and ask her find it in the book. It’s fun to be able to go back and forth between the book and the stuffies and practice the animal sounds and recognition.
Hopefully you found a few useful tips that you can use to help teach your little preschooler at home too! I’d love to hear about some of your favourite activities that you do at home too so please comment below!
Rejoice and Repeat 