Christmas Themed Patterns and Matching Activity

I like to hit the dollar store every now and then for craft supplies and reward trinkets for the kids.   I recently found these cute little Christmas themed eraser at Dollar Tree.   They came in packs of 12 for one dollar. They are so cute!   I bought 2 packs of them, having no clue what I would do with them. What in the world would my kids do with 24 erasers that are only in fashion for one month out of the year? I decided to put them to good use and came up with this fun activity for my preschooler to practice making patterns and matching. To begin, I put the erasers on my scanner in various patterns.   When I first scanned them with the white background of my scanner cover, there were lots of shadows on the page because of the erasers depth and the light from the scanner bar.   So I did another round using a piece of black cardstock on top of the erasers to eliminate any shadows. I like the way it turned out. I made a few different pages with different arrangements.   I made some with the erasers filling in entire rows across the page like you see above.   These are good for matching.   I also made other pages that only showed one set of a pattern and had room on the right side of the page for my daughter to repeat the pattern with the erasers. Once I had my scans printed, I laminated each page and cut each row into individual strips. I put the erasers in a cute little Christmas themed bowl which was also purchased at the dollar store. My daughter was so excited to see the fun new activity and she played with it at the kitchen table the whole time I was making dinner.   I do love attention-grabbing activities like that! Young children learn a lot about their environment by looking at and touching everything around them and they delight in their discoveries.   My little girl loves this activity.   She likes to just run her fingers through the bowl of erasers, study their colors and designs, and just hold the cute little guys in her hands.   All of this makes the pattern and matching activity even more enjoyable for her. Of course, eventually children get bored and have to change things up a bit.   My daughter discovered that there is also a lot of fun in just stacking the erasers too. This activity was really cheap to make and my daughter happily plays with it for about an hour at a time.   I know the Dollar Tree store near our house always has seasonal erasers like these so I plan to keep an eye out for some new ones for other upcoming holidays.