Today we’re blessed to have a very talented and creative guest blogger! Angela writes over at Teaching Mama, where she shares countless learning ideas for toddlers and preschoolers.
Here’s Angela…
In honor of Valentine’s Day, I wanted to share a hands-on learning activity using crayon resist hearts. Of course, you could do this activity any time of the year!
To start, you will need the following:
- 26 white hearts (I cut them out of cardstock paper)
- a white crayon
- watercolor paint
- paintbrush
On the white hearts, write the letters of the alphabet using the white crayon. Present all the hearts on a tray to your child and set up the watercolor paint.
Here comes the fun part! Explain to your child that there’s a secret letter written on each heart. The child’s job is to paint the heart and identify which capital letter shows up. It’s really a lot of fun!
While your child is painting, you can have them guess what letter they think will be on the heart. If your child is not able to identify all the letters, just help him out.
When your child is done painting, let the 26 hearts dry. I love how colorful they are! And my preschooler was very proud of his work.
The next part of the activity is to put the alphabet letters in order from A-Z. One skill preschoolers should be working on is knowing what alphabetical order means and being able to sing the alphabet song. This is a great way to practice this! I noticed that my son wasn’t catching on to the alphabet song very well, which is what prompted me to try this activity out. I had him put the letters in alphabetical order onto a bulletin board. He really loved this part! Periodically, we’d stop and sing the alphabet song to see if he could guess which letter came next.
We left it up on the bulletin board to keep practicing the alphabet song. This was a fun art project and hands-on learning activity for my preschooler.
Check out some of Angela’s most popular posts at Teaching Mama!
Angela is the writer and creator at TeachingMama. She has two little boys (4 and 2) and one baby on the way! Her blog is dedicated to sharing hands-on learning activities for toddlers and preschoolers. You can follow all of her learning activities on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and G+.
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angie
love it such creativity and learning go nicely together
Amy @ Wildflower Ramblings
I will need to try this!
Anna Geiger
So will we 😉 – thanks for checking it out, Amy!
Samantha @ Stir the Wonder
This is great! And you could do the same with any theme! Thanks Angela!
Anna Geiger
Yes, I love how versatile her idea is!