Five-Star Program for Pre-Kindergarten, Preschool, Toddler and Infant Education located in Greenville, NC.
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At our Greenville, NC preschool, the kids are so excited for the holidays! They can’t wait to see Santa Claus, they love the excitement, decorations, and lights, and needless to say, holidays are pretty much all the kids want to talk about! Fortunately, there are so many exciting opportunities to channel this excitement toward learning and development with fun, educational Christmas-themed activities. There are activities that cover every topic, from science and math to art and motor skills. Here are our favorite activities for preschoolers that will keep them busy and growing during this exciting time of year!
Felt board activities are a hit with kids and parents alike! Kids love to decorate and redecorate the felt board and parents love that it inspires creative play that’s also easy to clean up!
What you’ll need:
Cut out a large Christmas tree shape out of the green felt and you and your child can glue it to the cardboard or poster board. Next, you and your child can draw shapes on the felt as decorations for the tree, and your child can cut them out using safety scissors. Then, you and your child can decorate the tree (felt sticks to felt, making this easy and mess-free!)
This activity improves motor skills, encourages creativity, and you can practice shapes and colors with your preschooler, too!
Baking is not only a fun way to get your child excited about helping in the kitchen, it’s also a great way to boost preschool science and math skills while learning how to measure ingredients. Decorating the cookies helps develop fine motor skills while encouraging creativity.
Read the recipe to your preschooler, and see if he or she can help you gather ingredients and supplies. While you’ll probably want to be in charge of the messier ingredients, your child can measure out the dry ingredients with your help. You can even use this time to work on simple addition, explain the science of how ingredients come together, or tell stories to your child about baking when you were growing up!
While the cookies bake and cool, mix up different colors of frosting, showing your child how red and blue make purple, or blue and yellow make green. Add the frosting to a squeeze bottle or piping bag and let your child have fun (and practice fine motor skills!) by decorating and drawing on the cookies and dressing them up with sugar and sprinkles.
If your child loves science, this festive holiday science experiment will be a huge hit! Best of all, you probably have everything you need already on hand to perform this cause-and-effect experiment!
You’ll need:
Lay your cookie sheet on a flat surface, and put the cookie cutters on the tray. Sprinkle baking soda in the bottom of each cookie cutter, lightly covering the tray surface, and if you want to add some glitter for a sparkly reaction, go right ahead! Pour vinegar into a small bowl and add a few drops of red or green food coloring until it reaches the desired color.
Let your child use the eyedropper to suck up the vinegar and drop it into the cookie cutters. They’ll be amazed at the fizzing, bubbling reaction, especially as fizzy foam grows inside the cookie cutter. This simple sensory activity gives you a great opportunity to talk about science with your preschooler!
Working on letter identification is so important to learning to read, and this clever gingerbread matching card game makes it a snap! Plus, it’s so versatile, it can grow with your preschooler as his or her development needs change. You have 26 gingerbread people, each with a letter on their stomach and 26 gingerbread houses, each with a letter. You and your child can work together to match up the letters. If your child already identifies letters, you can use the gingerbread shapes to build words and work on reading.
You can either print the cards out on colored card stock or you and your child can simply cut the shapes out of construction paper. You and your child can practice writing by labeling each shape with a letter before getting creative with markers, glitter, and glue to decorate the shapes!
These are just a few of the fun, educational Christmas activities for preschoolers we recommend. There are countless resources for printing out holiday coloring pages, dot-to-dot pages, and so much more, too! These activities are not only great for development, they’re also a wonderful way to channel their energy into learning.
At our Greenville, NC preschool, we are passionate about cultivating child development in a way that is fun and exciting. Contact us today to learn more about the learning activities our teachers plan out every day to inspire growth and nurture the young minds in their care. Give us a call at 252-756-8200 and learn more about our center or schedule a tour to see our campus!
