If you are a caring parent and a teacher, you are definitely going to look for newer activities and ideas that are engaging and involve hands-on for teaching a preschooler. Teaching an adult is a relatively easier task as compared to teaching a preschooler and the answer to this is quite obvious! An adult has his own craving for learning things and you have their attention, you don’t have to work hard in grabbing their attention. This is not the case with preschoolers. They are busy in their own colorful world. Your idea has to look extraordinary to their colorful eyes to get their attention.
We all know little ones love to play. So why not leverage that playtime for learning? This list of literacy activities for preschoolers is a great start for introducing youngsters to letters and setting the stage for lifelong learning!
Everything is worth learning in early childhood. Play is learning. Creating is learning. Working with your hands is learning. So that’s what this page is. A list of fun ideas and learning activities for preschoolers!
- Identical Stack Building
Take a stack of plastic cups, and write a single letter on each. Then line the cups up in a row, spreading them out a bit. Give your child a small soccer ball (or any softball), and instruct them to kick the ball toward the letter cups. Once they knock a cup down, instruct them to say the name of the letter on the cup. For a more advanced version, say a letter first, and see if they can aim for the corresponding cup.
- Letters on colorful stickers
Form a rainbow on a wall with different colors and then pick some circled stickers. Use the marker to write one letter on each circle sticker. Give the child the sticker sheet, and instruct them to peel off each sticker, say the letter, and stick it onto the part of the rainbow with the matching color. This helps little ones work on letter recognition, color discrimination, and fine motor skills.
- Connect the dot and make letters
Make dots on a sheet of paper and hand over colorful pencils to your children. Ask them to join these dots and form letters. If they repeat this over some period of time, they will get hold of these letters and numbers. This will enhance their motor skills and help them learn these alphabets more effectively.
- Storytime
Narrate stories to teach them lessons for life. Children learn best when they personify things. Use creative storytelling strategies to make learning playful and engaging.
- Treasure Hunt
Plan a hunt for your little one in a closed limited spare, maybe a room or a small garden. You can hide items related to your lesson and ask children to go and find them. For example, if you teach them wild animals, hide a few toy animals in a garden and ask them to search only for wild ones! This way you can turn their learning into a total fun activity,
- Sorting Number Stickers
It doesn’t get much simpler than this activity. Draw a grid on paper, and place a number in each box. Provide your students with a sheet of number stickers, and let them move the numbers into the box with the matching number. After all of the numbers are used up, encourage them to write each number themselves in the corresponding box.
- ABC Go Fish
Cut paper into card-sized squares, and write a letter on each one, making two of each letter. It’s best to use groupings of letters so you’re focusing on a few at a time. Split the cards between the players, and follow the standard rules of the game to make as many matching letter pairs as you can. “Do you have a B?”
- Recycling
Old scrabble games are the perfect literacy tool to play with. Arrange the letters to form rhyming words with children who are interested and allow everyone to play with the tiles as they like. Even if the kids wind up building houses out of the scrabble letters, they still see the letters and establish familiarity.
