DIY Activity Sheets (3-5 years)

We now have a wonderful tutor who comes home to teach my husband and I some beginners Spanish. So often we sit around with our notes all over the place, doing our Spanish homework. What parents do influences kids right? So one day when our 4 year old brought home his Maths bundle from school, he opened that too and started doing "his" homework (yeah, thats what he called it!). i.e filling up pages that weren't completed. 

That's when I remembered the tons & tons of used paper work that I had discarded before moving houses, of *awesome* printables created by *kick-ass* homeschooling mamas. (here's one I'd posted, when he was learning his alphabets) Although I felt guilty about the massive quantity of paper that I threw away, my son had learnt a *lot* and had spent many afternoons after school with them.

I don't have access to a printer now, so figured why not make some easy ones. All you need is a *very basic* level of drawing skills (I mean seriously, look at my drawings!) . The Practical Mom logic is  that creating an activity should take minutes, they  don't need to be high quality or artistic or anything, cuz kids don't care about that stuff anyways.

I use these sheets for "parallel play", i.e. he can do his sheets while I do my own work on the same table. 

Memory Cards. Cut up a cards (or simply use Post its!) & draw. Each picture should be on a pair of cards. Earlier I'd made numbers & shapes cards, this time I made it christmassy. Stockings, Rudolph, Snowman & Stars. You get the gist! 

How to play with 2+ people: Mix up cards and place them up side down on the table. Turn two cards to see if they match, if they don't, turn them back and in their places again. Then the second person gets his turn. The goal is to find the pairs, the player with the maximum pairs wins. 

Connect the dots. Draw your picture lightly with pencil. Then with a marker pen dot the points where the lines meet. Number them & then erase the pencil marks, & voila! a connect the dots sheet is ready.

Beginning Sounds: Draw objects on cards and lay them out with alphabets (or alphabet cards). Kids need to match the beginning sounds with the alphabets. (Christmas objects = lot of words beginning with S!)

I Spy: Draw many objects on a large sheet of paper and a card to write down the count. A pretty good practice to write numbers too.

Match the following: Draw many christmassy things on both left & right margins of the sheet. Make sure the colors match, i.e. for smart alecks who'll say "but mama this star is light blue and that star is dark blue so they don't match." uh. Yes that actually happens. 

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