Charlotte Today: Indoor Activities

Our Director of Monkey Business April was featured on Charlotte Today this morning discussing some fun indoor activities when your monkeys need a break from the heat.

When it is too hot to even go to the pool or a summer storm ruins your outdoor fun, head inside and ignore the screen with these fun, educational and motor sensory developing ideas.

Children need plenty of short, fun activities that will allow them to use their hands and develop hand/eye coordination in a way that swiping a screen just cannot do! And it’s a bonus if these activities also develop and support letter and number recognition and formation, math skills, color identification and more.

{These ideas work with children ages 3-5.}

Letter Recognition and Practice:

Here are fun letter activities for children before even putting a pencil in their hand to write letters. And if your older child complains when it’s time to practice handwriting you can pull out these fun tools and they won’t realize they are “working!”

Use shaving cream on a cookie sheet or in the bathroom to write letters, sight words and more.
Create sensory bags filled with gel or shaving cream and trace letters of name, names of people in house, vowels, constants, etc.
Hide and find letters with large letter magnets in sand for younger kids or smaller ones in play dough or molding dough for older kids. Turn it into a game to see who can find the most vowels or consonants, once you find them all see who can make the most words out of the found letters.
Use Fundanoodle Muscle Mover cards for engaging activities to get the wiggles out before using the back to build letters with play dough and pipe cleaners.
Use Fundanoodle I Can Build kits and I Can Pound kit to build hand strength and letter recognition.

Math, Shapes and Numbers Practice:

Use clothes pins for a homemade sorting game. Roll a dice and use the clothes pin to pick up pom poms or other small items and sort into cups or containers for young children to work on counting and sorting, greater than and less than. With older children you can use cards with math signs (plus, minus, equal) and create simple math problems with the pins or other items.
Use puppets for picking up items to work pincher grip and hand strength. Use a timer to pick up items and move them into cups and then count the items and determine who has less and more. You can then sort colors and even make charts of the colors.
Have a race to fill cups by having children guess how many beads (or other materials such as beans) will fill the cup then count them to see how close you are. You can also use a dice to roll and fill cups based on numbers or time how long it takes.
Use Fundanoodle bead cards for shape and color recognition.
Have squirt bottle races in big pot or the bath tub with floating bath toys. Move the toys with the squirt bottle to the other side (this is great hand strength!) as a race or guess how many squirts it will take or which things move faster or slower. This is also great outside in a baby pool!