Brooke Wheeler, a stay-at-home mom to two young children in Gretna, wrote this guest blog for momaha.

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It’s March. For those of us with younger kids, we’re either getting ready for Kindergarten roundup or preschool registration.

I could hardly believe it was time when I got the preschool registration letter saying signup was just a month away. My oldest is a Kindergartner, and now I have to prepare my baby for preschool. I know, it’s just registration and that I still have five months before the real thing.

All emotion aside, I worried that I haven’t worked with him enough, and that he isn’t adequately prepared. Thankfully, my husband reminded me that it’s called pre-school for a reason. So why am I worried about whether or not he can recite his full name, address, my maiden name and his social security number?

Because, unfortunately, that’s what we moms do. Worry.

I’m confident he’ll do great in preschool. However, if I come across an activity that is both fun and educational, such as the one I’m sharing with you today, it certainly can’t hurt in my quest to “pre-school readiness,” right?

Materials:

Paint sample cards
Clothespins
Scissors
Glue dots

Instructions:

1. Grab your paint sample cards. Cut small rectangles, approximately 1 inch, off the top of each color shade.
2. Grab your glue dots and clothespins. Glue each rectangle onto a separate clothespin.

3. Present the sample paint cards and the coordinating clothespins to your child, one color at a time. To help them understand the activity, start by taking one clothespin at a time and holding it up to the coordinating sample card and going down the line of colors and asking, “Does this match?”

If it doesn’t match, discuss why it doesn’t match. Is the color too light or too dark, etc.? If you find the correct match, have them open the clothespin, pin it onto the correct color and release the clothespin to make it close.

Little ones may need a little help with this at first.

After a while my son was doing the activity on his own, stopping only a few times to ask, “Is this right?” It was a great activity, and one of those activities that was fun enough, he didn’t even realize he was also learning.

Source: http://totschool.shannons.org

 You can find more, kids craft ideas on Brooke’s blog,thewheelerweekly.com.

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