Board Games with Preschoolers

Skills Children Learn While Playing Games

• Sharing and turn-taking
• Basic social skills such as conversing and staying focused on a social interaction
• Winning and losing with grace
• Making decisions for beginning strategy and learning consequences
• Early counting, color and shape recognition, and other cognitive skills

Tips to Make it More Successful

• Team up with a parent while learning the rules
• For card games, have children lay all the cards down face up in front of them
• Teach children how to win (strategy) in addition to basic rules
• Support decision making and strategy
• Insist on turn taking as much as possible
• Help winning children realize that it was their “turn” to win
• Help losing children realize they’ll get a “turn” to win if they keep playing
• Emphasize that the goal is to have fun to playing together
• Play together regularly!

Games We Love

What games does your family love?  Leave a comment and share a recommendation or a tip to make playing together fun for everyone.

Tags: fine motor skills, preschool

Making a Morning Schedule

A daily organizer is usually best used by children who are at least beginning to read. Keep the words as simple as possible. If you’re willing to be your child’s “reader,” this list will also work. But, if you’re looking for independence, try a picture chart instead. These organizers are designed to be checked off with a star or a sticker and work best if your child chooses a reward that is available for completing the chart. Be careful about making perfection the standard for the reward. This can be very frustrating for some children and defeat your purposes.

Picture card schedules are commonly used with special needs children who have communication difficulties. But clearly they work for preschoolers who are still learning to read. Several subscription-based or for-purchase services are available, but when I did this, I was looking for FREE picture cards! You can go through the various categories and find pictures to represent the things your child needs to do in the morning. Under “Food” you’ll find a breakfast picture, a backpack is available in the “School” category, etc. Yes, it was a a bit wasteful to print out a page of pictures and only use one or two, but my kids used up the scrap paper. So, less guilt there. My kids enjoyed coloring the pictures, while I explained what they were. Then we laminated them. Actually, I used packing tape to laminate them, but maybe you’re up for more than I was. Post the pictures somwhere prominent in your kitchen or your child’s room using velcro or magnets. As a task is completed, your child can move the picture to another spot on the wall or put it in a small basket, etc.

Giving your child a simple list of morning activities, adds to her growing sense of independence and competence. It develops a sense of responsibility and helps your child see how his actions contribute to the the family’s success in the morning. Finally, remember schedules are most successful when they are both consistent and flexible. Tricky, but true.

How do you keep your kids motivated and on task in the mornings? I mean, besides by nagging them to death…I’ve got that one down!  Leave me a comment and share with us all.

Tags: early elementary, preschool

Nature & Science with Kids

Messy Recipes for Hands-on Play

Dancing Popcorn
Fill a small glass about 3/4 full of water.
Add 2 tablespoons of baking soda and mix well.
Add a drop or two of food coloring.
Add 10-15 popcorn kernels.
Then add a few drops of vinegar.
The kernels will start to move in 1 -2 minutes.

Volcanic Eruption
Place an empty baby food jar on a tray. Surround the jar with salt dough to look like a volcano/mountain.
If you want to make this activity, a multi-day experience, the the salt dough dry or bake it in an oven until hard.
Then allow children, to paint or color the mountain, glue bits of twigs or leaves or grass on to make it look like vegetation, and otherwise decorate their volcano.
When you’re ready for an eruption, place a drop of red food coloring and a tablespoon of baking soda in the jar.
Then add vinegar to your volcano to make it erupt.

Catch a Cloud
Have you ever wanted to bottle a cloud? Here’s how!
Pour just a bit of water into a two-liter plastic bottle.
The adult should light a match and drop it into the bottle.
Immediately close the lid.
Squeeze the bottle a few times to watch your cloud form.

Make Butter
Use room temperature whipping cream. Pour some into a baby food jar or other container and let your child shake it for a while. The butter aill forming to a small ball. Pour off the liquid. Let your child taste it to see what’s different about it and milk. Spead the butter on a cracker or piece of bread. You may want a bit of salt.

White Mud
Unravel about 1 1/2 rolls of two-ply toilet paper and put it in a plastic tub.
Add some dish soap.
Slowly warm water, 1 cup at a time, while you and your child mix it all together by hand until you like the consistency.

Ice Cream
Fill a gallon-size ziplock bag half way with ice.
Add 6 tablespoons of rock salt.
Put 1/2 cup of milk or half and half, 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1/2 to 1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring into a small ziplock bag and seal. The ice and rock salt can puncture this bag so it is a good idea to double bag the ice cream mixture into another small ziplock bag.
Put the small bag inside the large bag and seal.
Shake the large bag until you have ice cream (5 – 8 minutes).
Note: The ice cream is going to be more a “soft serve” texture than like commercial ice cream.

Gooey Goop
1 cup cornstarch
a small amount of water

Add water slowly to cornstarch until the goop drips from the spoon.
The mixture will seem hard, but when you pick it up is slides between your fingers.
If it is too thin and liquid, add a little more cornstarch.
Add a bit of food coloring for fun. It might be a fun way to see how colors mix together.
You can use a funnel to put about 1/2 cup of this mixture into a water ballon. Then you’ve just created your very own stress ball for relaxation. Careful with young kids though since the balloon can be a choking hazard.

The internet is full of wonderful, hands-on experiments and activities that help children explore science and nature concepts. Share your favorite activity with us. Leave a comment below.

Tags: early elementary, preschool, sensory activities

Reading Comprehension

For children of all ages, reading or listening comprehension is enhanced by making predictions about the story, talking or thinking out loud about the story during while reading, and summarizing the story.  This is where parents reading with children is so essential.  Parents prompt and support this thinking-while-reading process.

Younger children love the familiar.  Parents quickly learn that they will be reading their child’s favorite book multiple times a day for months.  At our house, we read “The Little Engine That Could” day in and day out when my son was four.  This coincided with his general fascination with trains and his specific fascination with Thomas the Tank Engine.  This is just fine!  Read it again and again.  When children are familiar with a story, they can also pay attention to other pre-literacy skills such as recognizing how text flows.  Also, this allows a parent to mix it up a little bit.  Substitute words with other words that rhyme.  This teaches sound discrimination skills and reinforces listening comprehension skills when they realize that you “messed up.”  At the end of the story, ask your child what might happen next or ask them to make up a new ending.  Preschoolers can act out a story that they hear.  This is a form of summarizing.

For older children, have them read out loud to you.  Oral reading skills develop over time, so be patient and don’t over-correct your child.  This can cause frustration.  But do ask, “Does that make sense?” when the meaning is affected by an error.  This teaches the child to attend to meaning as well as to the phonics of reading.  Usually, my son and I will get a little laugh out of his mistake and he’ll correct the problem.  Older children should also be asked to make predictions about what will happen next.  Often I’ll ask my child to guess what a new vocabulary word means based on what he understands from the story.  Then we’ll keep reading and see if it still makes sense.  As much as possible, I try to get my son to summarize what happens in the stories we read.  Truthfully, he hates this.  So I tend to prompt with, “First, the story started with…”  He fills in the blank from there.  I’ll continue prompting him along with “And then…” or “After that…”  Other times, I’ll tell him that I want him to tell me three or four things about the beginning of the story, the middle of the story and the end of the story.

Obviously, reading comprehension has to also happen as children read silently to themselves.  So be sure to take the opportunity to assess comprehension after your child has been reading independently.  At first, you’ll find that many kids have much better comprehension reading aloud.  During silent reading, many children will skip difficult words or even a line of text and not necessarily slow down and figure it out when the text loses meaning.  This is less likely to happen if the child is interested in the book, but distractions can still happen any time.  So ask questions, have them summarize, have them predict what might happen later, or make up a new ending.  Ask them what characters look like or what the setting looks like.  Visualizing the text requires a child to extract meaning and really comprehend the writing.

We all make mistakes in reading and listening comprehension.  We miss a word or a concept and end up having a good laugh when we realize what was actually intended.  This is typical of most readers. As long as the problem is constant, you likely don’t need to worry much about your child. Just keep practicing reading.

Comprehension problems happen all the time with my daughter and songs.  At four, she’s sure she knows the lyrics and sings them loudly and doesn’t have a clue what it means.  Her version of “Swing, Swing” goes like this:  “Swing, swing from the table sauce; My heart is flushed by a former love; Can you tell me buy; And can anyway to carry on again.” Share your funny story about reading or listening miscomprehension!  We can all use a laugh!  Leave us a comment below.

Tags: early elementary, reading comprehension

Rote Counting

Rote counting is learned largely through repetition and drill-type practice. So the key to this is keeping kids interested! Frankly, this type of practice is boring for all of us. Have empathy for your child and you’ll greatly improve your success.

First, make sure you’re practicing in short sessions. I rarely set aside a block of time to work on counting. Instead, I find little pieces of time throughout the day and suggest we practice counting while we’re waiting for something else. It’s a form of distraction, and it usually has a fairly clear endpoint. Short, frequent, and consistent practice is the best way. A few happy practice times throughout the day is better than one longer miserable practice session. So do it while you’re waiting for things: the toast to pop up, the dentist to be ready for you, your friend to come over, the crosswalk signal to change, etc.

Second, break up the task into parts. Start with solidifying numbers 1-10. Then work on numbers 1-20. The teen numbers are tricky. Most preschoolers and some kindergartners are still getting a handle on them and often skip one or more or say them out of order. Some children always skip a particular number. One way to address this is to slow way down as you approach the number that your child skips and emphasize it. If your child isn’t predictable in this way, simply count slowly until she starts to build speed and confidence in the sequence. When your child skips a number, do encourage them to try again and slow down. Incorrect practice is not useful.

Next, demonstrate and practice numbers up to 39. This usually goes faster than learning the teens. At this point your child will probably start to recognize the pattern of counting and be able to figure out how to count the 40’s and 50’s etc. The task at that point is to learn the names of the groups of ten. Be generous with providing the next number after 39, 49, 59, etc. You don’t want them thinking thirty-ten and thirty-eleven are numbers. It’s best not to practice mistakes!

Finally, look for ways to add in sensory elements to improve memory. Number songs or rhymes can help young children learn numbers 1-10. Rhymes like “One, two, buckle my shoe” can be helpful. But, even chanting rhythmically will help. If your child is willing to sit down for a more formal activity, pointing to the numbers on a number chart will add in the visual sense and help them with number recognition. Any kind of dancing, marching, or jumping adds a kinesthetic element which will help your child focus and remember better too.

Tags: drill, early elementary, math, preschool