Frugal Preschool Fun

Written by Shaundra

Do you want to get your kids ready for Kindergarten, but don’t want to spend a lot of money doing it? My husband and I have five kids and we have been through preschool 4 times now. We have a lot of experience in teaching little ones and saving a buck at the same time. I know these ideas will help you too!

Buying all those writing tablets can get expensive, so we came up with a great idea! Here is what you will need:

One handwriting tablet with the ABC’s on each page (one page for Aa, one for Bb, etc.)
One slim dry erase marker
One yard of clear plastic table cloth (you can find this in the material section of your local superstore)

Now all you have to do is cut a piece of the clear plastic table cover small enough to cover the tablet page and let the kids practice with the dry erase marker. You can use this a million times and with multiple children. You will never need to buy another tablet until you begin working on cursive!

You can use this idea for anything. We bought enough plastic to cover our whole table. At one end we placed a large white piece of poster board underneath the plastic. Now we have our own make-shift white board. We have used it for math, spelling, drawing diagrams, the possibilities are endless!

I get so excited when I find free online resources!

My very favorite website for kids is www.starfall.com . This website will teach your child everything from their ABC’s to reading books! By the time your child has done every activity on this site, they will be great readers!

You can also go to www.pbs.org/teachers/earlychildhood/ and find some great resources for subjects like reading, math, art, and history. There are printables, games, and lots of fun ideas to get your kids learning.

www.mathusee.com has free online drills. They are fun and colorful and when your child gets them all correct, they receive a blue ribbon. My son LOVES that!

When you are teaching little ones it is very important to make things fun. Here are a few ideas:

Take them outside and let them write their ABC’s in the dirt or sandbox.
Go to your courthouse and count the steps.
Have them count the number of canned goods in the pantry. (4 green bean cans plus 3 corn cans equals what?)
Place post-its on things around the house like a POT, a HAT, the RUG, so they can get use to seeing what these words look like.

Remember, you can find teachable moments in every day and both of you will love the memories made while doing these fun activities.

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Comments

One Response to “Frugal Preschool Fun”

Tabitha says:
September 13th, 2011 7:01 pm

I’ve also used sheet protectors for this as well and it works wonders for lots of things. I have a standard shopping list that I put into a sheet protector then make a check mark by the things I need. The blank space I can fill in with miscellaneous things I need then as I collect the items in the store I mark a line through that item until I have everything on my list. Once I get home and put everything away, I wipe the marks away and put it back on the refrigerator so it’s ready for us to mark it for the next shopping trip. I love your idea for the clear plastic cloth because I can use that when I want several children to practice writing at the same time. Keep the great ideas coming 🙂