Preschool Family Reading Night, Part II: Discovery Baskets

A few weeks ago, I hosted our second Family Reading Night this year for my daughter’s preschool.  I’m always amazed and excited at the number of families that attend.  The Parent Association, which I’m a contributing member of, is hosting Spring Fling in a few weeks.  This is a day when families can come together, enjoy a picnic lunch, a petting zoo, and spring related arts and crafts.  Knowing this was coming up, I chose to make the theme of reading night related to spring.  So, families enjoyed “Discovering Baskets of Hands-On Fun” with a spring theme.  It was a night of building background knowledge to help prepare students for Spring Fling.

I created Discovery Baskets using six sub-themes of spring.  Baskets included the following themes:

• Caterpillars/Butterflies
• Baby Chicks
• Animal Babies
• Gardening
• Kites
• Birds

Each basket had several fiction and informational texts for parents to read aloud with their children and a hands-on craft or activity.  Students had fun creating butterflies out of coffee filters, making baby chicks out of pom-poms, sorting and matching animal babies and their mothers, sorting packets of seeds, creating flowers out of cupcake papers, making kites, and creating their very own bird nest out of playdoh and twigs.  It was a fun night!

Children and Parents Create Chicks

Children Sort and Match Animals and Their Mothers

A Cupcake Paper Flower

Would you like to create a Family Reading Night for your child’s preschool, but don’t know where to begin?  Check out Links to Literacy for more information!

©2010 by Dawn Little for Literacy Toolbox. All Rights Reserved.  All Amazon links are affiliate links and may result in my receiving a small commission. This is at no additional cost to you.

Hands-On Literacy Activities for Preschoolers

Children learn best by doing.  Preschool children learn best by playing.  With this in mind, I’ve developed a list of a few literacy activities that you can do with your child that incorporates active play/learning.

• Pipe Cleaner Letters – Work with your child to shape letters out of pipe cleaners.  Help your child make the letters of his name.  Work on additional words your child may know as well.  This activity is great for fine motor skills.
• Magnet Letter Match – Provide a cookie sheet and a box of magnetic letters.  Cut various pictures out of magazines and glue them to individual index cards.  Put magnets on the back of the cards.  Ask your child what the picture is.  Have your child match the letter to the initial sound of the picture.  For example if you have a picture of a cat, your child should match the letter “C” to the picture.

• Sticker Stories – Provide your child with stickers.  Have your child make a scene with the stickers.  Then ask them to tell you a story about the scene.  Write the story for them.

• Letter-Balloo – Put large pieces of cardstock with one letter on each one on the floor, have your child, swim, run, skip , crawl, jump, slither, or spin to the letters you call out.

• Rhyme-Balloo – Put pictures on pieces of cardstock.  Place them on the floor.  Call out a word that rhymes with the picture and have your child swim, run, skip, crawl, jump, slither, or spin to the picture that rhymes with the word.

©2010 by Dawn Little for Literacy Toolbox. All Rights Reserved.  All Amazon links are affiliate links and may result in my receiving a small commission. This is at no additional cost to you.