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Preschool at Home

By 21 Comments

My 34 month old is not quite ready for official preschool, so I decided to make an activity can so we could do preschool at home. This way I don’t have to go through all the work of having a complete lesson plan everyday, but he still gets educational and developmental activities worked in to his schedule. I color coded little sticks and put them in a can so we could pull out activities in a variety of areas each week including: Art/Music, Science, Physical, and Language development.

Preschool at Home Can

Supplies needed:

  • Big popsicle sticks aka tongue depressors
  • Colorful paper
  • Paper cutter
  • Scissors
  • Pen
  • White Glue
  • Fine tip Sharpie
  • Can (mine was an Ovaltine can with a lid from La Choy noodles because I wanted blue not brown)

I was going to glue the paper to the sticks and then exacto knife the edges clean, but then I remembered a 4th grade incident where they handed me a 2 liter bottle and a box cutter and wanted me to make a bird feeder resulting in this scar. I’m pretty sure box cutters are banned from Elementary schools now.

Anyway, I quickly realized that cutting the paper to size first would be way easier and safer.

1. Place a popsicle stick on the back of one of the decorative papers and mark the height. Then, mark the width, continuing across the whole page to fit as many as you can.
2. Using your paper cutter, cut out all the little popsicle stick sized rectangles.

3. Using a squiggle of glue secure a paper strip to the stick. Trim the excess corners with your scissors.

4. Once you have your sticks in four colors (Art/music, Science, Physical, Language), write the coordinating activities on the sticks using a fine tip Sharpie. I got mine from many resources, so I also put the reference of where to find the activity description whether a book, magazine, etc.


Edit: I got many of my preschool at home activity ideas from Family Fun magazine, Utah Family Magazine, and lots from my kid friendly and preschool collections of bookmarks from blogs.

5. Decorate your can however you like and place the completed sticks inside.
6. I figured 4 days a week for preschool at home was plenty so we will draw a different colored stick each day so we get activities in each area.

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Comments

  14. Thanks for the resource list ideas – but do you have a list of the actual activities that you chose to put in the can? I love the idea by the way. Thanks for sharing. Kendra

    Reply

  17. I love it! My son’s a tiny bit young for it right now {18 months} but I can never think of what to do with him so maybe I’ll have to start one for ME to get ideas! 🙂

    Reply

  19. What a great motivation! He/She will love getting to pick out a popsicle stick…especially when he/she discovers it has fun things to do!!!

    Reply

  21. Stop working so hard, you know you can buy the jumbo craft sticks with the fabric already on them. A company called Roylco sells them in a package of 50, I purchases some for my preschool class here at the rec center. We ordered them from S&S worldwide, they were pretty cheap too! I did not know what I was going to do with them, now i know.

    Reply

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