We’re going to take a fun break this week and offer a few exciting giveaways to our readers from our sponsors!
FBS Books is a wonderful family run business offering a wide selection of homeschooling materials, a wealth of books and inspiration for the Christian home. Today we are excited to offer a cute little preschool pack to one lucky winner!
Preschool Gift Pack includes:
Pattern Blocks (Retail: $16.99) This Melissa & Doug activity is perfect for little preschoolers and includes 10 wooden pattern boards and helps develop early color, shape, and matching skills. Fun for ages 2 and up.
Shape Sorting Clock (Retail: $12.99) – A great tool for early introduction of teaching time recognition along with color and shapes in this fun wooden clock. 12 removable wooden shapes and a movable hour and minute hand make for a creative educational toy. Alphabet Bob Books (Retail: $16.99) this set of My First Bob Books includes 12 books of 12 pages 
each, presenting the letters of the alphabet in a gentle, fun, easy-to-understand way as only Bob Books can! With upper and lowercase examples of each letter, animal characters and charming stories, your child will have fun learning new letter sounds.
each, presenting the letters of the alphabet in a gentle, fun, easy-to-understand way as only Bob Books can! With upper and lowercase examples of each letter, animal characters and charming stories, your child will have fun learning new letter sounds.A wonderful fun set for a special family!
To Enter:
1. Please leave a comment below and share your favorite learning idea that you have used with a preschooler.
Giveaway Closed.
FBS books is offering free shipping on any order with the coupon code: FREESHIP. If you are planning your fall homeschool curriculum, now is the time to buy and save. Check out their wealth of good resources!
well, this is going to sound real original… but, I love teaching my kiddos while we are cooking together. they learn so much about food, measurements, temperatures etc…
This looks really great! My favorite learning idea with a preschooler is to just take it easy and not stress so much!
They learn so much just by living life with you. If you have lots and lots of GOOD books around and give them a learning-rich environment, they will learn, with little effort on your part! Watch very little TV, play outside a lot, let them join you in your day to day activities, and READ READ READ!
Oh how I would LOVE to win this!! I am starting to home school my preschooler this fall and have at least two more that will come behind him. What a timely blessing this would be!
My favorite idea is something we’ve been doing this summer: taking a letter of the alphabet every few days and building our daily activities around that. For example, today was “G” so we tried a free gymnastics class at our local Little Gym, we ate grapes with lunch, we’re going to play Gator Golf (a Game) tomorrow, we looked for green things, yesterday we watched the Curious George movie at a local theater… Each new letter begins with building a letter page (my older writes the letter himself, my toddler colors in a block letter I draw for him) complete with pictures and stickers that represent that letter.
With a child that has sensory issues, I have found the best learning tool has been “exploring”. We do a letter or color a day. Then we go around and find objects that are the same color or start with that letter and touch, smell, look, and taste if appropriate. Its fun because we take the time to hunt for items. Then we work with the sensory issues of feeling and texture by touching, and tasting.
Our favorite learning activity – read, read, read! Just yesterday I read almost all of the Eloise Wilkins Golden Book Collectin to my older two (they’re 4 1/2 and almost 3).
My daughter will be two in one month. We use textured flash cards with her that have the name and picture on the same side, then just the name on the back. She can already read “duck” and she loves them!
My favorite learning idea/philosophy is Montessori-inspired. Just the concept of letting children doing things for themselves and giving them tasks they can succeed at is so wonderful. I love the practical life stuff for 1-2 year-olds, like pouring and dexterity-building activities, like putting toothpicks in a shaker.
My daughter learns best by using flashcards and music. She would love these!
I love music, which I think is a great way to teach. I also love to do arts and crafty things with my DD. I don’t mind getting messy and she has a blast!
my three year old would enjoy all of that
I think the most frequently used tool in our house is answering our four-year-old’s questions very thoroughly. He asks a LOT of questions. I always try to give him an honest, informative answer and he soaks it up and retains almost all of what I tell him. A few weeks ago, he asked me what “khaki” meant. I told him it was a color like tan. He said, “Mom, I’m getting kind of khaki-ish from staying out at the pool!” haha!
Lately I have been using Mommy Teach Me lessons for my toddler. It is amazing how just changing the way I play with her has made an impact on her learning!
I am currently love Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons. Great stuff.
Music is a great learning tool! It can teach anything from alphabets to bible stories. My little girl loves to sing the songs she learns at church, and she has a great alphabet song that teaches the letter sounds.
As a follower of Christ, the main thing I want to pass along to my girls (3 and 1) is an understanding of Who God is. Outside of following God myself, one of the best ways I have found to do this is by reading “The Jesus Storybook Bible” to them (particularly my 3-year-old). We read it every night and she LOVES it. Every Bible story is written in a way that helps the child (and the parent!) realize how it all points to Jesus. Of all the things I can teach my girls, I feel this is the most important, and the constant reading and learning about who Jesus is has been one of my biggest starting points for continuing discussions about how He changes our lives.
the clock is on my daughter’s bday wish list and I was looking at getting a more advanced set of M&D pattern block sets…this would be perfect!
I use cookie sheets & pour salt onto it. Then I have my preschooler make shapes or numbers or letters in it using her fingers. She loves it & stays focused much longer than other times!
My favourite learning tool is a number and shape sorter we purchased on vacation. My daughter is only 1, and I didn’t expect her to show any interest in it for some time, but playing with it has really sharpened her fine motor skills. It’s been an amazing discovery to me just how much children can stretch their abilities if they’re given a pressure-free challenge. And just by naming the pieces for her as she plays, we’re teaching her shapes, colours and numbers without even trying.
My favorite/current teaching tool is an alaphbet book my daughter has become interested in recently. We go through it twice a day, at least, using the phonetic sound for each letter and then sounding out each picture on every page. She loves it and is learning phonics without realizing it.
My favorite thing to do with preschoolers is cook! You can teach so much about print concepts, following directions, and math when cooking.
I am a homeschool mom of two boys and was just about to buy the Melissa and Doug pattern block set, so maybe I should wait a couple of days:). I have been blessed to teach my boys and one of my favorite resources for ideas has come from the book, Slow and Steady: Get me Ready. My husband a full-time student and in any way I can save a buck on homeschool materials would be a blessing!! Thanks!
Wow, great giveaway! I try to incorporate our learning into the little things we do daily. For instance, I have my son help me with breakfast and ask him to count the eggs as I crack them or pull them out. I have him count the number of green beans on his dinner plate or the number of carrot sticks I give him for lunch. Things like that. That way I don’t have to separate the learning. Now he just counts things on his own as he picks up his toys or plays with someting alone. It’s so cute to actually see him doing this without me having to initiate it.
Jennifer
My three year old has learned to love letters long before I was ready or thought he was ready to put them together. So I let the fascination brew naturally, and let him draw them backwards, make letters out of Legos, and he has had more practice than he ever could have had if I made him sit down to do “schoolwork”. And now, his penmanship for his age is remarkable! And I think he is now really ready to start putting them together. I love new ways to make learning FUN!
We have are weekly trip to the library to borrow lots of books. We have started with non -fiction books, and now mommy learns with them!
We read read read! We also tie as much activity as we can into whatever concept we’re working on at the minute. Right now it’s respect – so scripture, books, videos, teachable moments, etc. relating to respect so it he “gets” it.
This stuff looks so wonderful! Nothing beats cooking with a preschooler for great learning opportunities!
My favorite project with the kids is making paint crafts and artwork with their hands and feet.
Oh my, how wonderful, pick me pick me!!! We’d be SO blessed by this! We have 3 younger ones two olders and are trying to adopt a young sib set. We NEED all the preschool help/resources we can get! My little preschoolers LOVE making homemade koolaide play-dough of all colors. It makes them feel SO big and smells SOOOOOO good.. We also LOVE painting and cleaning bikes and outdoors kids tables with shaving cream. We like building things with popsicle sticks and doing sock puppets or cutting animals and adding those goggley eyes to make things. We also love dancing to christian african, indian, mongolian and asian music on our computer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb8c2L2BHEg
you can click either of these and even purchase worship in their languages that is SO beautiful! This songs is our favorite with the little African dance. http://www.youtube.com/user/HSIOM We also love reading about orphans and children in other countries and praying for them, finding out how life is for them! Anyhoo, we hope to win!
We love to read, sing, and talk together. We speak intelligently to our children and take time to answer their questions and correct them gently when needed. We also make sure to include them in our day-to-day activities as much as possible, explaining each step as we go. It’s simple but has worked well with all three of our children in helping them strengthen their language skills.
I do my best to involve my preschoolers in what I do. They shop for groceries with me, help me bake, and when I can slow down enough to involve them in it, help me clean the house as well. It is so important to teach them these real life skills, and they have fun doing it!
I love the idea given to me by a woman I look up to of how to acclimatize a preschooler to a new baby. While looking at your new baby with loving eyes and facial expressions, talk about your toddler/preschooler while they are in the room. You get to bond with your baby as well as your preschooler as well as teaching your preschooler about babies.
I made a learning board for my preschooler–it’s a bulletin board that I decorated with fun colors and we have a letter for each week, a country we learn about, something related to nature, such as an animal or plant, etc. We also have a calendar and an area for the weather.
My son and I love to take nature walks and talk about everything along the way. He loves to take treasures home to show daddy.
Pick me please! My husband and I just got our foster license and according to our social worker will most likely have a preschool/older toddler placed with us by end of the summer and I need all the help I can get!
Oh, I’ve always wanted to have Bob books to help teach my children. So fun! Great site and products!
My two kids are 3.5 and 2. We don’t have any formal “teaching” time, but rather, we look for opportunites to learn as we go about our day. For example, my kids love to play “I spy” with letters and numbers as we go through the grocery or home improvement store. We make an effort to “connect the dots” : such as pointing out “this book is written by the same lady who wrote “Goodnight Moon.” ” And we’ve been very intentional to read to them since they were both infants.
My little guy is still pretty young–only 2 1/2, but our favorite learning activity to do together is reading. I love to read and talk about what we have read or see on each page. My son is now memorizing the books he loves best and I’m so glad that he loves books!
I am a mom of a 5, 3 and 1 year old and I am very excited about officially starting homeschooling this fall. I had decided 2 years ago to homeschool and have been keeping my eyes open for games, manipulatives and curriculum that will survive through all the kids.
Now, an idea for preschoolers…I did this little craft with my 2 oldest kids and they thought it was great. It was “a book about ME”. Each child made there own little book out of coloured paper folded in half and stapled. I clearly printed everything they wanted me to write about them. Ie: My name is…I am 4 years old. My mother’s name is…, i have 1 sister, her name is…I live in the town of… and so on. One fact per page. I found it helped them to learn their family tree, geography and reading. They ‘read’ it to themselves. When I get my printer figured out I will print little pictures to add to some pages. Some of the pages they drew pictures of themselves, the dog, the house, whatever.
They learn lots and have fun doing it.
now that my 2yo is in the imitating phase, i really think about each task I am doing and try to find part of it that he can do with me.
I love your sight. You are giving away some wonderful things. I love preschoolers. I always find that reading is a great way to facilitate learning. They all usually love to be read to. Repitition, repitition, repitition. To repeat things the same way every time has been successful in my house. Anything hands on also goes over well. They like to feel “big”.
We love to read stories and then do art and craft projects that tie to that story.
We love the Bob books….have worked through some of them and it is amazing to see my little one beginning to read!
I have a set of stuffed alphabet letters. I’ve always enjoyed playing with these with my preschoolers as we go over the related phonics sound. (: As they get older, they’re perfect for beginning spelling, too!
I use every day moments like a lot of mom’s do to teach my 3 year-old. I have her count out the cans we put into the cart at the grocery store and things like that . Then I use a simple alphabet tracing book and allow her to pick out which letter she wants to learn and then we watch that letter’s video on sesame street.com. And then we’ll do a craft. We’ll do that 2x’s a week for about 20-30 min. Very low pressure. She think’s it’s great!
I have four children and my oldest will be 8 in November. I have noticed that the joy of learning is key!! and theme related themes. For instance, one day we celebrated Reduce Reuse Recycle. making crafts from old things, picking up trash in an open area of town, watching curious george Recycle, buying an organic t-shirt at Wal-mart(on sale) and then getting a certficate.
I haven’t homeschooled a preschooler yet. Doodlebug is only 1. Can I still enter please? I would love to have these tools to use with her.
Pick me please. This is our first year homeschooling and I need this stuff for my littles!
Wow! What fun. I’ll be spending some time browsing their website. Thanks for sharing~lisa
I first taught my daughter the letters in her name and when she could recognize them, we started writing them together and now she can write her name!
My 4 year old made an alphabet lapbook. We also practiced making letters with playdough. Rolling them out and shaping them into letters.