More preschool activity ideas

Great preschool activity ideas for little, or even completely "FREE" fun activities for toddlers. So if your toddler is driving you crazy then here's some really fantastic toddler activities for you both to try here.

Shaving foam Play

You will need: 1 can of shaving foam, 1 large deep tray, Small plastic spoons, plastic bowls,

What to do: Spray all the shaving foam into the deep tray. Then give your child the bowls and spoons and let them play and explore. Let your toddler move the foam around any way they please and role play as in making dinner. I recommend you supervise with this toddler activity, however shaving foam is safe for a child to play with. Believe me they will only try and taste it once :-)

A really great preschool activity idea that allows you toddler to get messy with out it being a big problem. This will be another texture for them to experience as well.

Conclusion: Your toddler will develop hand to eye co-ordination when grasping the spoons. Also they will learn about quantities when placing spoonfuls of shaving foam into the bowls. This is a very early stage of preschool math activities. Then there is the most important feature of this preschool activity and that is having FUN and being creative.

Jelly Play Activity

You will need: 2 or 3 colors of jelly in bowls (made up the previous evening), plastic spoons, plastic knife and forks, a deep tray.

What to do: Tip the set jelly into the tray, then place the spoons, knives and forks on the table by the side. Your toddler will then have some great fun using these utensils to explore the jelly. No doubt they will have a go at tasting and even eating some of the jelly :-)

Conclusion: Your child will be experiencing the different textures. These kind of toddler play ideas are good for toddler language development. They will use new words to describe what they feel, such as soft, hard, wet. This helps with with their general toddler development in learning to be creative.

Color Game

You will need: Set of colored crayons, red, green, blue and any others, large white paper (office paper will do)

What to do: To start with you will need to fold the piece of paper like a concertina (fan). Roughly about 5 times creating deep pleats.

Next give the pleated paper to your toddler and open one pleat at a time and ask them to use one color and draw on the paper. Next fold that pleat over and ask them to color the new paper a different color. Keep repeating this until all your toddler has colored in all the paper between the pleats.

The next step is the toddler game where you hold the folded pper in front of you. Then you unfold the first pleat and encourage your toddler to shout out the color that is showing.

Then open the next pleat and repeat until they have named all the colors. Obviously they will need a little help with the first few times playing this game. however it won't take them long before they know many different colors. You will have to buy them a very large selection of crayons before you know it.

Conclusion: Your child will be learning to recognise lots of new colors very quickly. It will also help with their toddler langauge development by shouting out the names of the colors. These preschool activity ideas are all about repetition as all young children learn by repeating things over and over.

Color chart

You will need: Coloring chart, a room full of everyday things.

You will need to print off your free preschool printables color chart here for this toddler activity.

Once you have your color chart ready and on the table or stuck on the wall. Ask your toddler to look around ask them what color different objects are.

Then each time they see a certain color they have to put a tick in a box next to that color on the color chart. The aim of the game-activity is to see which color you have the most of in that room.

Then to finish you will count off the number of ticks in each box for each color. Then ask your child to see if they know which color was the winner. Then to finish with get your toddler to draw a picture (their own interpretation) of the object that was the last chosen one of the winning color

Conclusion: This is one of those great preschool activity ideas that helps with color recognition, while being a fun math games for kids. You also end up with some more preschool art to put up on your fridge.