Fun Learning Activities Kids
Earth Day is always are wonderful reminder to recycle or upcycle items that we have in our homes and try to find new uses for some of them. If you are like me, you have piles of old magazines waiting to be given a reason to stay rather than end up I in the recycling [...]
Having a good memory is a great skill to have in life. Every time we count, read, spell or use our times tables we’re calling on knowledge we’ve memorized. There are so many practical applications of using your memory in life too – as you recall your shopping list or cook a meal without a [...]
Do you find yourself constantly “tidying –up”? Do you feel like all your hard work cleaning is undone as soon as the kids walk in the door? Do you ever ask yourself if you live with a bunch of ‘whirl-winds’? As a mom of 3 busy kids, I felt like I was constantly picking stuff [...]
Did you grow up eating candy buttons? I used to love them and recently bought some giant ones for my son’s Lego birthday party. I cut the candy buttons into a variety of shapes and passed them out in goodie bags. I tend to overbuy for parties… so I still have a lot lying around. [...]
We’ve had fun welcoming spring, learning and exploring with birds, eggs and nests. Our neighbor had a wasp nest – Woot! The kids and I had fun watching the wasps enter and leave the nest… and then watching me spray it and knock the nest off the side of her house (I hope she didn’t [...]
Once you become an adult, so many things in life become automatic. We eat, we bathe, we get dressed, and we rarely take the time to examine how we do those things. For our little ones, some of these tasks are still relatively new and can also be challenging. We used a mirror to “follow” [...]
I recently went to Wal Mart to shop for party supplies. One of the items I wanted was a bag of balloons. I found the balloons but also discovered a fun new kind of balloon – LED balloons! They have a little light in them that is activated when you pull out the tab. Then [...]
There is a lot of do-it-yourself, creating at our house. It’s fun to see how taking a child’s lead can turn into a great play idea. My daughter has been attending swimming lessons and commented that the floats the children use are cool, because they stick to the side of the pool walls. A suggestion [...]
We love Easter Traditions and Activities – one of our family’s favorite thing to do together is to use art to decorate a “spring tree”. I saw this activity, in an extremely old Better Homes and Garden’s Family Activity book, and jumped on it we were so excited! I had to tweak this Easter craft a [...]
Kids love playing with ink stamp pads. They use rubber stamps with them but they also like to stamp their hand or even their thumbprints. Why not turn those simple thumbprints into a cute piece of art – Thumbprint Art! All you need is some paper, ink stamps and a thin black marker. Let you [...]
We had fun this past week learning map skills together thanks to a recent conversation in the Horizon Healthy Families community. Caroline of Food and Art had the idea of hiding food all around a room for kids to find – sounds like fun! We decided to mix it up a bit and added a [...]
This week we’ve been having a lot of fun creating learning activities that also relate to some of our favorite spring topics- eggs, bunnies, and flowers. Today I want to share a cool counting game we created using buttons and some large foam eggs. Materials Needed for Egg Math: Large foam eggs (or some eggs [...]
“Upcycled” or recycled art is a great way to re-use items that would otherwise end up in the dump or at a recycling plant. It’s a great way to get creative and use free art materials! We recently created recycled art with biodegradable packing peanuts. Biodegradable packing peanuts are not like styrofoam packing peanuts which [...]
Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep little baby… Have more than one child? We do! Naptimes are a struggle as we have to manage the different ages and activity levels of our preschooler/elementary aged kiddos with the *need* for a naptime for our tots. This “struggle” has led me to collect our [...]
There is so much for children to learn by spending time in the kitchen. It’s tempting to send my kids off to play while I’m fixing dinner. However, I often encourage them to stay and help me – even though it make take twice as long by doing so! Cooking is fun and educational for [...]
My family is very Irish, and although St. Patrick’s Day is a year round holiday for us, we still celebrate St. Patrick’s day on March 17th. Since I haven’t been home for St. Patrick’s day in so long, we figured we needed to send some St. Patrick’s day fun to our friends and family. This [...]
Ok, so this is not all that original nor is it all that creative, but let’s face it, sometimes we have to use what we have in the house and scramble around last minute to plan a craft or activity for our kids. This was no exception. Last week, everyone was posting all of these [...]
My 3 year old has started helping out around the house with a few easy chores of her own. She loves to help me in the kitchen with washing vegetables and mixing ingredients so I was going to get her a little chef’s apron just to make it more fun. However, I know kids love [...]
Preschoolers often learn how to count before they can actually identify the actual written number. My daughter is this way. She can easily count to 20 but struggles when I point to an 8 and ask her to tell me what number it is – we haven’t even begun working on recognizing written word numbers [...]
We had been using aluminum foil for a school project. Once we were done, my kids started playing with their leftover foil scraps. It really is fun to play with foil! Then they started asking for more. And more. Aluminum foil is inexpensive and so much fun to create with that I let them use [...]
We had a blast today at the park playing with our homemade Marshmallow Shooters! They are very easy to make with some basic supplies. Here is all that you need to make two shooters: Supplies: Plastic cup – I used a Glad disposable food storage cup. The tops had cracked but I couldn’t bear to [...]
The trees here have all lost their leaves. Even the tree that has taken root on the refrigerator is leafless. I thought it would be fun to put a cardboard tree with magnets on the refrigerator and have my almost four year old use it to explore and learn a variety of concepts while decorating [...]
These are my daughter’s new friends at home- Balloon People or Balloon Friends, as she calls them. Best part of this is that she designed them all. She has had a lot of balloons in her room for her 4th birthday. She has made some balloon drawings on some of those. And one of the [...]
I recently discovered some fun games and activities that I can make at home for my little girl. They are called File Folder Games. There are tons of free templates for File Folder Games on the Internet but this particular one I made is a pattern matching game. File Folder Games are so easy to [...]
There are tons of great creative children’s blogs – and every month a bunch of us get together on twitter for a chat. In last months chat, 57 bloggers discussed our playing schemes and dreams of what projects we think would most interest our kids or what we would love to do with them in [...]
What could make a child squeal with joy about an old toy she has played with a hundred times? ICE! For years I’ve borrowed little trinkets from my children’s toy box and froze them into a block of ice for them to play with. My 7 year old son still gets so excited about [...]
It’s winter, time to enjoy what snow you have in your area – of it you are like us, in Texas, to dream about a snow-filled winter with some of these fun kids activities. How many of you have had snow already this year? Let us live vicariously through you and your family and tell [...]
Friends of my family growing up had a manger in their house in place of a tree and they filled the manger in the days leading up to Christmas with gifts for Jesus. I love how that symbolizes the meaning of the season. Nativities are another great way to help tell kids the Christmas story. [...]
Lacing cards improve hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills in preschoolers I love lacing cards. They are an easy activity to take with you to keep children busy in the car. There aren’t many parts to them, they don’t take batteries, and they are completely silent. But lacing cards aren’t only a good thing for [...]
Often what is fun is really simple. So simple that all it requires is two willing participants. My 5 y/o, Rhett, is ALWAYS willing to play our little gymnastic games. His favorite is flying. I lay on my back {preferably on a soft grass surface, but often in our living room} and put my feet [...]
