Fun Learning Activities for Pre-schoolers to Do at Home

A child’s own home offers a rich and comfortable place for them to learn the lessons they are traditionally taught at school.
Being creative is the key for making engaging kids in home-based learning sessions. Try to make the best use out of objects commonly found in the house, or even digital gadgets, to allow for a wide range of fun learning activities that pre-schoolers can do at home. Here, we’ve compiled a few pre-school activities at home to serve as inspiration for your own ideas.

1. Explore the world with arts & crafts

Children have loads of creative energy, and they’ll need an outlet to slake their adventurous spirits while they’re safe at home.
Find out the parts of the world or nature that your kids are astounded by – some are fans of all sorts of animals in the wild, while others are captivated by space and the stars above.
To nurture their growing curiosity for these topics, you can provide them with a loose assortment of things from the house - spare cardboard or paper, buttons, yarn (be imaginative – your kids are!) as well as tools such as scissors and glue.
If your child enjoys space, task them with creating the constellations with yarn, paper stars and pins, or research and make a diorama of the surface of their favourite planets.
Are they wilderness whizzes? With cardboard, crayons and other knick-knacks, you can encourage them to make their own play set of a biome like a savannah or a jungle, complete with figures of various animals that they’ve drawn themselves.
Kids can be immersed in these learning arts & crafts activities for pre-schoolers. You can also try to help them out by teaching them how to safely use tools or make various figures properly.

2. Gamify their math lessons

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Math at the pre-K level is very simple. Some young kids get bored by the repetition, while others become disinterested due to how sterile and lifeless math can be when taught at school.
Luckily, you can very easily create games using a preschooler’s math topics and a little bit of imagination.
Many games work best when you have two or more pre-schoolers at home. Round up some plastic bottle caps – even paper strips will do! – and write simple problems on one side of them, and their answers at the back.
Make a load of these and set it between your kids, tasking them to take turns picking up a cap and answering the problem. If they get it right, they get to keep the cap, and the one who earns the most caps wins.
You can turn this set-up into a collectible game, adding cool decorations or designs based on their favourite topics, which can make them eager to play it frequently.
For solo games, think about puzzles or memory-based challenges. You can set up a role-playing or interactive story-time session with them, where they have to solve equations as clues or keys to progress through the adventure.
There are also plenty of fun online math games for pre-schoolers. If you’re too busy to prepare new games, they are excellent ways for kids to spend their time productively – while also being engaged.

3. Use puzzles to practice language skills

At this precocious stage in a child’s education, it’s important for them to participate in fun learning activities for pre-schoolers to do at home to enhance their vocabulary, grammar and language mastery as they can.
To develop their grasp over a language, a child has to gain familiarity with it, and learn how to handle its various parts and aspects for effective writing, reading and thinking.
Puzzles are great exercises in this regard. Let’s say you want to teach rhyming words, with a little bit of vocab practice. Gather some rectangular pieces of cardboard or pasteboard – or old dominoes and make several groups of them. Mark the dominoes in half, and write one rhyming word on each half, before making another set on the other half.
Do this for every group, then scramble them all together. Lay a starting domino on the table, and task your child to connect another piece which has a word that rhymes with the starting domino. See how many connections they can make while engrossed in this activity.
Be sure to check out classic word puzzles as well, including Scrabble and Hangman, or supercharge their vocabulary with a game like Bookworm Adventures.

4. Make scenarios for problem-solving

Problem-solving skills are valuable assets for young kids, and should not be neglected in any teaching curriculum at home or at school.
With their burgeoning minds and great ability to absorb new knowledge, encourage kids to think outside the box and apply their lessons through solving tricky scenarios. Immerse them with some roleplaying – make them detectives investigating a crime scene, an explorer trying to unlock a secret jungle temple, or an astronaut trying to decode a friendly alien’s language.
Enjoy yourself in making the challenges for them to solve: for an investigation, scatter different-sized footprints around the house for them to measure and drop a hint of the suspect’s foot size so they can compare it with the prints. Then, teach them how to collect and dust fingerprints using flour and a paintbrush.
If you’ve got some little explorers on hand, designate a room in the house as the “Treasure Vault” and lock it – put some treats or prizes there as well. Hide the key somewhere. Give them a map that tells them how many paces they should go in which direction to find the key, but make it so each number of steps they go is an equation that they have to solve first. With some prep work, this can get them busy all afternoon.
Do your kids want to talk to an alien? Enlist them as astronauts who have to negotiate with an alien to get some rare Space Gems or Moon Cheese, with a twist. Make it so the alien only speaks in rhymes, so the kids have to rhyme their requests as well.