3 Fun Ways to Paint with Toddlers and Preschoolers

As a stay-at-home mom, I'm always trying to come up with fun activities for my kids to do beyond coloring and Play-Doh.  Not that there's anything wrong with these things, but my kids get bored of them pretty quickly.  And when they get bored, what do they do?  Bug each other.  Which in turn bugs me.  So it makes everyone a lot happier if I have a few new activities to offer, especially during the winter when it's cold and we're stuck inside and even when it's summer and it's hot outside. *wink*

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How To Motivate Your Preschooler To Do Chores

At the beginning of the year, I shared a preschooler chore chart I had made for my daughter.  It was a really simple system of moving a magnet with the chore on it from the 'not done' side to the 'done' side.  However, we started running into problems when my son hit a growth spurt and could reach the chore chart too.  He would run off with the magnets and it would be a couple days before we found them again, usually in the most unexpected places.  (Isn't that always the case?)

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Bubble Snake

The weather here in Utah has been pretty crazy lately.  It will be sunny and 80 degrees one day and the next will be rainy and 60 degrees.  My poor kids ask me every morning if it's going to be a warm day outside so they can play in the yard.  Thankfully, today the answer was yes and they were outside as much as they could be playing on the swing set, jumping on the trampoline or splashing in the water.

One of their favorite things to do outside is blow bubbles.  We go through more bubbles than almost anything else they play with.  (This could also be due to the fact that they tend to spill the bubbles...)  While my son was napping, my daughter and I made a little contraption that when you blow into it, a stream of bubbles comes out the other end.  We call it a 'bubble snake'.  It's really simple and costs practically nothing to make.

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Kid Science: Growing Seeds In A Bag

A few weeks ago, I thought it would be a good idea to get some starts going for our garden.  I bought some soil and those little biodegradable pots and used some seeds I already had and then planted two of each kind.  I made sure they were watered, got plenty of sunshine during the day and brought them in at night because it was still pretty cold.  This lasted about three days.  One afternoon, we had a crazy windstorm and guess what got left outside.  My little plants.  My daughter discovered them and came running inside with tears streaming down her face: "Mom!  The seeds!  They blew over!"  She was really sad about it.  Sure enough, there was dirt all over the patio and no seeds to be seen.

Since then we've had some snow and rain and sunny days and I haven't attempted to start any more plants, not sure if it was really springtime yet.  One day, I remembered a time in first grade starting seeds in a plastic bag using a wet paper towel to keep the seeds moist, then sticking it in the sun and watching the seeds sprout.  Duh.  Why didn't I think of this before?  (Answer: Probably because even though I've had a garden for the last few years, I'm still an amateur gardener.)  Turns out this is actually a viable way to start seeds for your garden and not just an elementary school experiment.

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Teaching Your Preschooler Time

Kadie: "Mom, what's for lunch?"
Me: "It's not lunch time, it's breakfast."

Kadie: "Mom, last year I went to Aunt Dani's house."

Me: "Sweetheart, we were there yesterday."

Kadie: "Mom, what's today?"

Me: "It's (insert day of the week)."

Kadie: "Does that mean it's splash pad day?"

If you've ever tried to help a young child understand how many days it is until a certain event or activity, you've probably been met with confusion and frustration that it's not happening right now.  This is because small children live in the present and they have a hard time thinking abstractly.   Time is a very abstract and intangible concept, which is why it is difficult to grasp until they get closer to age 6 or 7 and their brain starts to develop in a way that they are able to begin to understand things such as time.

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12 Fun Ways to Teach Your Child the Alphabet

This post originally appeared on Muddy Little Toes where I was previously a co-contributor.

One of the first songs I remember singing to my daughter was the alphabet song.  I'd sing it while changing diapers, in the car, during bath time, waiting for dinner...pretty much all the time.  When she was about 20 months, she started singing the song on her own with a little help here and there.  By the time she turned 2 years old, she knew the song and could recognize some letters (mostly the ones in her name).  Currently, she is 3 (turning 4 in January) and she knows all the letters by sight, can write about half of them, and knows 3/4 of them by sound.  I'm not telling you this to toot my horn or say that I'm a great teacher when it comes to letters.  But there are some tools I've used that have proven to be successful for my daughter, and my son is starting to catch on as well (he is 18 months).  Check out the list below and see if anything catches your eye!

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How to Make a Chore Chart for Preschoolers

I've been thinking for a while now that I wanted to give my daughter some daily chores.  She's turning 4 next week and it's the beginning of a new year so it seemed like a great time to get a program going for her.

I started out by making a list of chores.  The easiest way to do this was to search for 'age appropriate chores' on Pinterest.  There are tons of charts that break it down by age that I found so it didn't take long to make a list of my own.

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