Combine play sand with cornstarch and you get lots of sand fun!  What is great about this mixture is that unlike regular sand, it cakes together when slightly damp.  Almost becoming hard, but smashes back into sand.  All of my kids enjoyed playing with there new “outdoor only” tub!  I will warn you though, they were covered in sand when they were done!  The “clumping qualities” exist on clothing too – haha.  This was messier than regular sand, it didn’t just brush off until it was bone dry (aka when …

Do you remember Cootie Catchers from when you were a kid?  I loved them!  Here is a cootie catcher perfect for the learning to read kiddo in your life!  For our paper we used one of the sheets of Shaving Cream Painted works from yesterday.  I was inspired by Jimmie and her daughter Sprite (love their blog).  They created cootie catchers for learning history and math facts at Heart of the Matter Homeschoolers.   If they can make one for the Civil War, I bet I can make one about “Short …

I loved discovering Mindi’s site, B.A. Bookworm, we are bookworm wanna-bes over here and I love some of the ideas she has for ways to encourage reading in our kids!  She is an advocate for getting kids up and moving, rather than sitting in front of a TV (or computer – we love starfall and online educational game over here!)  All you need for these activities is a brown paper bag and some creativity!

I love our fun activity box, well, actually we have two of them, one for when we travel with the kids and one for when I need to occupy them say at Church or another event where they have to sit quietly for a few hours.  Depending on how you use the box and how creative you get, the entertainment can last for hours!  To make the box last longer, only pull one activity out at a time.  If you don’t need to worry about stretching the fun out, try …

As we are working on learning our letters we have been having fun learning how to write them. Here are several ways that you can help your preschooler or kindergartener have fun while learning to write letters and words. You can also use these same techniques to practice tracing and working on any fine motor skills.
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First we have sticky sticks. These are great for tracing letters you can also use them for “dot-to-dot” activities. I drew the letters out first for my daughter, but for a …

This is a super simple activity I remember playing when I was a kid.  Basically, we created a stop/go sign and one person got to be “in charge”.  When the sign said go we ran around like crazy banshees!  When it said stop, we’d stop.  Super simple!  Kept them entertained for quite awhile.  I even got a morning “quiet time” as a result of all our running!  I have some resting preschoolers this morning.
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What you need to make your sign:

Paper towel roll (I think we used the insert from our …

Got rambunctious kids?  I do, three of them!  When it is cold and wet outside we get to hangout indoors and often cabin fever can drive us bonkers.  Here are a few ways we enjoy moving around and being silly when cooped up indoors.  Do you have any indoor activities your kids love to do?  Share them with us in the comments, or if you have a blog post let me know and I’ll link you into this article!  We are always looking for creative ways to stay active!
Building Tents …

We are learning to site read several words thanks to Starfall (see previous post) and we decided that there is no better way to put our words to the test than by labeling ourselves.  I hope that this activity helps solidify the word associations that my kids are learning.
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For this preschool activity we dressed in our swim suits, it is late fall, and my kids miss summer time.  Wearing their swimsuits, goggles and floaties and getting to re-live their summer-time adventures was a lot of fun for them.  Before …

This is a spin off of a previous post.  The kids have a ton of pent-up energy today!  Time for a variation on the boredom buster dice.  We made an exercising dice.
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With a dice and labels, we marked the sides of the dice with exercise options: Jump, Hop, Stomp, Clap, Arm Circles, and Crawl.  We added a few other “tools” from around the house, a rug, a scarf, paper plates, pillowcases, etc.
Here are some of the activities we did with our exercise dice and household items.  As we are …

Today was one of those days where the weather is grey and miserable and our runny noses have us staying home from our usual activities.  However, my kids aren’t about to let a little sniffle stop them from playing so, inspired by the topic of children’s show we saw this morning,  I set up an indoor field trip :  Astronaut Training! 
I used things I found around the house to create a morning of astronaut training.  I made a list of all the stations on the easel and we used …