Preschool Activities to do at Home

My kids are in preschool very part time right now, which means that they spend the majority of their time with me. I try not to get all “they are going to fall behind” crazy when they are only 4 and 2 and not in school as much as other kids their age, but……I don’t want them to miss out on education these early years. Like most young kids they enjoy all of the activities they do at preschool, so to keep the learning going I started to incorporate some easy preschool activities to keep them busy at home. Here are some of my favorites (besides, of course, the sanity saving educational cartoons, thank you Team Umizoomi).

Melissa & Doug Magnetic Calendar

With this simple calendar, we get to spend a few minutes together every morning talking about the date and days of the week, I don’t think they really understand what it means, but at least they are becoming familiar with the names and routine of it all. They like choosing the weather and temperature for the day (even if it never changes) and talking about the activities coming up.

Dry Erase Board Letter Tracing

I don’t expect my kids to be able to write perfect letters by any means, but something about dry erase boards and markers keeps them occupied (and QUIET) for longer than 3 minutes, so we do this often. We spend some time practicing how to hold the pen, then look at and name the letters. This is helping with letter identification and sounds, even if they don’t have the coordination to actually trace them very well yet.

ABCMouse.com

Instead of watching you tube videos of toys all day (which my kids would totally do if I let them), when it’s computer time I let them play on ABCmouse.com. You do have to pay for a subscription, it’s about $8 a month and you can have a few kids on one account. It took my three year old roughly two minutes to figure it out and now sits and goes through all of the learning paths on his own. My two year old sits on my lap and we do it together. They sing songs, learn about letters, play games, and color pictures.

Do you have any fun preschool type activities to keep the kids busy and learning at home?

Side note, this is not a sponsored post for any of these products. I just wanted to share some of our favorite activities with others who may be looking for the same thing!