This activity helps small children with their counting skills. All you need are some tongue depressors, glue, small pom-poms, beans and a colored marker. Take the tongue depressors and glue different amounts of beans or fuzzy pom-poms on them. Make enough sticks to show numbers 1 through 10. Let the children help you count each bean or pom-pom that is on the sticks. You can also use colorful jelly beans if you wish instead of regular beans and you can also write the number on one end of the stick or on the back of it.
This creative activity helps children develop motor skills and also helps with social skills, as each child will learn the correct place for him to sit at a table in a group. All you need is some colored construction paper, various magazine pictures, scissors, glue and self-adhesive laminating sheets. The adult will help each child cut pictures of their favorite things from magazines, such as toys, animals and foods. Give each child a glue stick and let them glue the pictures onto a piece of colored construction paper. You can also assist them with this. They can also draw decorations on their paper with crayons. Once they are finished, an adult can laminate the paper with self-adhesive laminating sheets. Each child can keep her placemat at her spot at the activity table or snack table so she can recognize where to sit.
To help toddlers with memory skills and learning their colors you can use flash cards. You can make color flash cards yourself with a set of index cards, colored markers, glue and pictures cut from various magazines. On the front of the card, color a large circle with the colored marker and on the back of the flash card, paste a picture of something that is the same color. For example, on the green card you could paste a picture of a tree or a frog, and on the red card you could paste a picture of an apple or a tomato. Have the children sit in a circle with you while you hold up the different cards and let them guess at the colors.
Finger painting is a creative way to help small children express themselves. You can also use the paints in accordance with various lessons. For example, if you are teaching the children about different shapes or colors, you can let them make paintings of all the different shapes they can remember. You can also use the finger paints to help teach a lesson on hand washing, showing children how to wash all the paint off their fingers in the sink and to properly use soap and water.