Preschool Powol Packets

I am delighted to bring you this toddler (or early preschool) level Farm Animals Packet! My 2-year old has already had a lot of fun playing with the dot pages and matching the animals cards! What's in the packet? There are 3 sets of activities: the Animal Dot Pages, Shadow Matching Cards, and 2-piece Head-Tail Puzzles! How can you use these pieces? Here are a few suggestions: FARM ANIMAL DOT PAGES:  * "Paint" them with dot markers! * Fill in the dots with pompoms, coins, markers, or magnets (never let a child put a magnet in his/her mouth)! * Count the dots on each animal! * Glue yarn or beans to the dots! SHADOW MATCHING CARDS: * Spread them all out face up on a table and let your children match them! * Glue fabric to the backs and match them on a flannel board! * Glue half of them to a file folder and use them as a portable file folder game! * Turn them all upside down and play memory games with them! HEAD-TAIL PUZZLES:

Today I'm sharing free Preschool Bear Theme Playdough Mats! Playdough is wonderful for developing fine motor skills and engaging creative play, and these playdough mats create a fun background to use your playdough with a bear theme ! These playdough mats are fun for imagining stories, sparking play time, and just engaging your kiddos for a few minutes! In fact, my toddler loved them as much as my preschooler! While you're playing you can talk about how many black and brown bears hibernate (like in the story Bear Snores On), but some bears (like polar bears) do not sleep through the winter! In fact, these tie in wonderfully to bear themes, winter themes, and spring themes! You can also talk about bear diets (fruit, berries, fish, and small mammals), and how most bears give birth inside "birthing dens" while they hibernate! The babies are born tiny  with little hair and closed eyes. The babies eat for 2-3 months inside the cave, but the mama bears do not

Today I have a fun easy reader all about arctic animals for kids! It's been a cold week for Houston! We have had high's in the 40's and 50's for days, and our kiddos keep telling me things like "It's freezing!" I like to use these bursts of cold air to talk about places that are even colder...like the arctic! ( Check out our collection of free arctic and antarctic printables here! ) My 4-year old preschooler loves putting these little books together and reading them to everyone! While we worked on this one we talked about arctic animals, what it would feel like to live somewhere colder than our freezer, and special adaptations the arctic animals have to live in the climate they do. All the animals in this little book live in the arctic and some, like the walrus, even live farther south than just the arctic! When we finished making our little books, we polled everyone here (and even made a few phone calls!) to find out who likes cold. We