How to Set Up Simple Preschool Activities at Home

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Being a SAHM is truly a blessing because I am the one to experience each milestone my children reach and be in control of their days.

While engaging in unstructured play is an important work of childhood, my children get tired of playing with toys all day.

And so do I. This is why I chose to set up some simple activities to help structure our days.

Creating a plan for our days helps minimize toddler tantrums, keeps my daughter engaged, gives me an opportunity to reinforce what she is learning in preschool, and gives us a chance to reconnect with one another & engage in meaningful conversation.

When I am doing these activities with her, I am focused on her and she’s getting her mommy bucket filled, which leads to a happier toddler and a happier mommy.

The following categories are what I use when planning preschool activities to do at home with my three year old daughter.

Alphabet & Letter Recognition Activities

We read lots of books in our home! Reading books is one of the best ways to teach your toddler and preschooler their letters. There are so many wonderful ABC books you can read with your child, but these are our favorites!

There are a few favorite letter recognition activities I enjoy doing with my daughter. One is using the Do-A-Dot Markers to trace the shape of the letter. I created a booklet of Dot-A-Letter Uppercase Alphabet Letters you can print and engage in with your preschooler. This booklet is one of the many resources you’ll find in my Teachers Pay Teachers store called Nurtured Learners.

Tracing letters with a marker, crayon or dry erase marker is another important skill for preschoolers to practice. Tracing builds strength in the hands and fingers, preparing your preschooler for writing. It also improves hand-eye coordination. Rainbow writing involves tracing the letters in different colors, hence creating a rainbow 🌈.

Wipe-Clean Alphabet Cards are perfect to pull out and practice letters with your preschooler. There’s something so engaging about a dry erase marker, that’s for sure. We like to throw these in the diaper bag or keep in the car for entertainment at restaurants and on car trips. Since they are dry erase, there is no worry of a mess!

Stickers are perfect for teaching ANYTHING! You can use them for letter recognition, counting, sorting, writing stories, etc. In this case, I am using these emoji stickers to help my daughter build her own picture dictionary on a ring! All I did was take plain index cards, punch a hole and add a ring. Then, I wrote the uppercase and lowercase letter on each index card. We will work together to place the stickers on the index card that matches the first letter, starting with 2-3 rows of stickers. We will name each sticker and talk about the name/sound of the first letter. This is an activity that will be ongoing as we will do 1-2 letters at a time.

An additional activity that reinforces letter shape, letter name, letter sound and works on your child’s fine motor skills is cutting and gluing pictures that start with a specific letter. Print off a letter using Word Art (or draw a bubble letter on a piece of paper) and pictures of something that starts with that letter. Guide your child as he/she cuts out the pictures and then glues them onto the focus letter. You can also use stickers to cover the letter. For example, use star or smiley face stickers to cover the letter S or heart stickers for the letter H. Cut up colored pieces of paper would be fun too!

Counting & Number Recognition Activities

Your child can count ANYTHING! There are so many items already inside & outside your home for counting: beads, buttons, pennies, socks, blocks, Little People, toy cars, spoons, cups, Cheerios (or any cereal), Goldfish crackers, Teddy Grahams, Mini Marshmallows, balls, rocks, sticks, acorns, flowers etc.

From my days as a teacher, I have packs of mini erasers and counting bears. Plus, I’ve saved the colorful caps from applesauce and baby food pouches because I knew there were activities surrounding them (counting and color sorting).

The important thing to remember with counting is the concept of one-to-one correspondence. Make sure your child is pointing to each item as he/she says a number or using a chart like the one pictured below to represent a number.

Once again, reading books about numbers is a great way to put them within a meaningful context. Nibbles: Numbers is our favorite because we love the naughty Nibbles character. Dotty & Dash’s 123 is fun to read because the numbers pop up on each page.

As with practicing letters, there are dry erase books for practicing numbers. Wipe-Clean Writing Numbers gives preschoolers LOTS of practice tracing numbers within a silly picture and writing them on a line. Since it is dry erase, your child can erase each page and get lots of practice opportunities writing his/her numbers.

Wipe-Clean First Numbers and Wipe-Clean 123 are additional learning resources for supplementing your child’s math instruction in preschool. All of these books give your child opportunities to write numbers over and over again, which is so important because we know practice makes perfect!

Color Identification & Vocabulary Building Activities

Learning and practicing colors can be lots of fun! The Usborne Big Book of Colors is our ABSOLUTE favorite color book!! There are pages for different colors and examples of color mixing. The pages are BEAUTIFUL and really grab the attention of young ones. WE enjoy looking through this book, talking about the different objects on each page, learning the different shades of each color and becoming familiar with how mixing colors forms new colors. Below is a video to give you a peek inside this pretty book about colors.

Here are some more of our favorite books about colors:

Construction paper is an easy way to create a color sorting activity. Simply lay the sheets of construction paper on the floor. Then give child a bin of various toys/items from your home OR have him/her go on a hunt for items of each color, placing them on the matching piece of paper.

For those toddlers working on their cutting skills, you can have them cut out pictures of food/clothes/household items in different colors from magazines or the grocery ads from the Sunday newspaper. Then glue the pictures onto each sheet of construction paper. It becomes his/her very own color book!

If you don’t have any construction paper, simply mark paper plates (or napkins/paper towels/white paper) with different color markers. Use these to place items sorted by color.

Art & Fine Motor Activities

The magic painting books are a favorite in our house. All you need is water! Each picture comes to life with color when your child paints with a wet brush. It truly is magic and your child will love watching the picture transform to a colorful illustration.

I brought out a Felt Learning Assortment I found in the Target dollar section, our wooden animal and car lacing beads and printed a fun recipe to make with my daughter. The felt activities were inexpensive and my puzzle loving daughter would especially enjoy the shape puzzles. The lacing beads are great for practicing those fine motor skills! Plus, we can talk about the animals and cars as they get put on the string.

I thought these Lucky Charms Marshmallow Treats would be easy & fun to make and delicious to eat after lunch. Baking and cooking is such a valuable activity to engage in with your child. So much can be learned in the process! One of my favorite things about baking and cooking with her is the patience she learns while waiting for the butter to melt or the cookies to bake.

Seasonal Learning & Vocabulary Building Activities

I love planning special seasonal activities and reading special seasonal books with my kiddos. Focusing on specific seasons and holidays during these seasons builds vocabulary. Plus, it is fun to learn about the holidays. The activities are special because they only come out once a year.

I am writing this post when it is St. Patrick’s Day so I printed activities and pictures of shamrocks and leprechauns. I also cut strips of colored paper to build a rainbow garland with my daughter. This is one of those activities you can then use to decorate your home for the holiday. We hung the rainbow garland along the stair railing. My daughter enjoyed seeing it every time we walked up the stairs to her bedroom.

You are probably wondering how I store all of these materials as I plan them. Well, this 5 drawer desktop storage unit helps me organize the books/activities by category. It also contains all of the materials, preventing my desk from becoming a cluttered mess.

So, there you have it! The five categories I focus on when planning some structured & hands-on activities during the day with my three year old daughter. Have you tried any of the activities described in this post with your toddlers/preschoolers? What book or activity interests you the most? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below! Feel free to share any additional activities I didn’t mention in the comments below 😁 I’m always looking for new ideas!!

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