Cheap Activities to Do with Your Kids
by This is a piece for parents who have little to no money so spend on going places with their child. It focuses mostly on those children who aren’t quite toddlers but aren’t babies any more. The activities in this piece can be use for older children as well, it’s defiantly not limited to toddlers.
What’s the most efficient way to have fun with your child and teach them something at the same time? Most websites will give you activities that aren’t age appropriate for younger children. My son has just turned two and I want to share with you some of our activities.
Your local supermarket like Walmart or Kroger will have everything you need very cheap for this first activity. At our Walmart here in little Georgetown, Kentucky, we have little foam letters in a foam board for older children to play with for a dollar. If you take all of the letters out of the board, give your child a crayon and a piece of paper they can play with it safely while learning. Let your child pick out the color they use to make it more exciting for them. They also learn a color and how to think for themselves. They can then trace the outline, with your help of course, and learn their ABC’s. Seeing the outline of a word, letter, or number is something that a lot of scientists and elementary educators are using now to help the child memorize what the word, letter, or number looks like. Your Baby Can Read also uses this method. It seems to work with a lot of young children.
Another activity to learn numbers and have fun: All you need is twenty (20) paper plates, stickers or paint, or crayons/markers. For my example, I’ll use the sticker idea, but you can potentially use anything, just be sure to supervise your young ones. On ten of the plates, you will write a number (one through ten). On the other ten, you and your child will put stickers to match the numbers. Your child will learn to count while developing their fine motor skills, that is, using there fingers better. Another thing I like to do with my son is to let him color in a coloring book for a week or so and then we get my “grown-up scissors” and his safety scissors and cut out enough of the pictures to be able to take some stick glue and help him glue them on to match the numbers. By matching the numbers, I of course mean that you write a “ONE 1” on a plate and you and your child will put one object, shape, etc. on another plate to match it. When you are done and everything is dry or can be lifted up, you can hang these pieces of art in your child’s room as decoration and to remind your child of their numbers a lot. This also makes their room more inviting to them and they will want to spend more time playing in their room while you do something they can’t help with.
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