5 Activities To Keep Your Pre-Schooler Engaged During The Holidays

School holidays are fun times. You get to share quality time with your child. But it can be a difficult time as well. Keeping children busy and engaged throughout the day is not an easy task.

To help you with this job, we have curated 7 activities that you can plan which will not only help your child remain engaged but also help them in their learning. These activities will take care of your child’s developmental needs too!

#1. An Activity To Improve Fine Motor Skills

This simple game requires very little preparation:

What you need: A few colourful pom poms, some clothespins, a bowl and a glass.

What to do: Place the pompoms in a bowl. Keep the glass on the side. Now tell your child to grab a clothespin, press to open it, grab one pompom at a time from the bowl and put in the glass.

Development of fine motor skills is one of the principal requirements of your child until the age of 3. Along with fine motor skills, this will also strengthen your child’s hand. The more colourful the pom poms, the greater the fun!

#2. An Easy Counting Math Activity

A one ingredient fun activity that you can enjoy with your child.

What you need: A variety of flowers.

What to do: To start with, tell your child what are flower petals. Once done, start counting the number of petals in each flower. This game is more fun if you find flowers with many petals such as daisies. To make things more interesting, while counting, you can also include identifying the colours of the petals in the activity.

This activity improves your child’s counting skills and also their colour identification skills. Be there to help your child with the counting, but don’t count it for them.

#3. I Spy Sensory Bag

This is a sight word activity (words that children can memorise so that they can associate them with their meaning whenever they see those words).

What you need: A ziplock bag full of rice grains and a few paper chits.

What to do: First, make a list of sight words and write them on small chits. Put these chits in the ziplock bag and fill it with grains of rice. Shake well and give it to your child along with a paper where you have listed all those sight words. Her job will be to scour through the bag and bring out the chits and match them with the list.

This activity will help your child with her sight word learning as well as vocabulary. It is a fun activity too!

#4. Fun With Bubble Wrap

Who doesn’t like bubble wrap, isn’t it? This activity lets you use bubble wrap in a fun manner to refresh your child’s alphabet and number learning skills.

What you need: A bubble wrap which has not been burst.

What to do: Take the bubble wrap and write words and numbers at random on top of each bubble. Do not repeat an alphabet or a number. You can use colourful ink to make things more interesting. Now, sit with your child and utter an alphabet or a number. Your child’s task will be to find that bubble with that alphabet or number and burst it.

#5. Fun With A DIY Sensory Box

Sensory Boxes are very good learning tools and loved by kids all over the world. They improve children’s gross motor skills, vocabulary, memory and other areas. This DIY sensory box will improve your child’s sensory skills.

What you need: A medium-sized cardboard box, a pair of scissors or a knife.

What to do: With the scissors cut two big round holes (the size of the bottom of a glass) so that your child can put hand hands through them to scout for items inside the box. Now place different kinds of whole fruits inside the box – banana, apple, grapes, orange, guava, etc. and close the box. During the activity, when you mention a fruit’s name, your child’s job will be to put her hands inside the box through those holes and find out the right fruit by feeling them. This will help your child identify fruits by their feel and not by their sight.

These activities combine learning and fun and are super easy to organise. Hope you have as much fun in organising them as your child is playing.