PreSchool Activity Bags

My homeschool support group did a PreSchool Activity Bag Swap last year.  We followed the plan in the book, and everyone was assigned 2 projects to make 13 bags of each.  In return, we each ended up with 26 different activity bags.  These are just gallon-size bags filled with materials needed for that activity and labeled with directions.  (Be sure to check out the website…they have more than just PreSchool Bags – there’s Reading Games, Science Bags, etc.)

I was thrilled with how they turned out!  And so were my kiddos!  They were mainly for my youngest, but my other 2 children had fun “helping” him with them.  :)  And it worked out so nicely for me to hand him a bag and let him do the activity while I worked with his brother or sis.  Some of the bags were not activities that he could do on his own, so I had to pick and choose and save others to do with mommy!

So this gave me the idea to put together a few more simple activities to put into bags for him, like strips of paper and scissors because he just loves to cut, and cut and cut…till there are tiny pieces all over!  But if I add another piece of paper and a glue stick to that bag, he’ll glue those cut pieces down like a collage – and he needs little assistance from me (other than keeping one eye on him…he is a 3 year old with scissors in hand…).  Other simple ideas
are stickers and a sheet of construction paper, construction paper shapes and a glue stick, magnets on a cookie sheet, bottle caps marked with letters for matching upper and lower case, etc. 

Along with my bags from the swap, I already had some bins with various manipulatives available to use – animal counters, letter blocks, lacing boards and beads to string, puzzles, a Lauri Sorting game, fishing for numbers or colors, magnetic pattern blocks on a cookie sheet, and little stash of file folder games.  But they don’t always get used.  Or they just get dumped on the floor and left.  So I was thinking about a plan for putting these activity bags and other manipulatives to use in a more organized way each week.  Rather than just having these tools available, I want to have them used!  There’s no sense in having these resources if they don’t get used!

 I am also using Letter of the Week Curriculum with him this year, so I was thinking of looping this in with the activity bag idea.  And then they are all ready to go, so no daily prep work for me!  I’ll post when I have my plan laid out.  Until then…

Happy Bagging!