Children are little researchers, with preschool games they playfully learn everything about the environment. As a parent, you can nurture this innate curiosity and use it to gently prepare your children for school. However, your child will only benefit from this if it is done in a playful way and without any pressure.
What you need:
- large water tank
- different materials (e.g. cork, stones, fabric, wood)
- different vessels of different sizes
- Handkerchief
- Feder
- various objects to drop (e.g. feather, stone, ball)
- Plant seeds (e.g. sunflower or bean)
- a piece of bed or a flower pot
- various guidebooks
- an empty notebook
- Photos
- paper and crayons
- Glue
- picture books
- Objects of different shapes, colors and sizes
Preschool games as experiments
- Experiments are not just interesting in chemistry class. Children like them from the start. Build a real laboratory for your child and their friends.
- With a large water tank (with a pad or outside so the whole apartment doesn’t get flooded) and different materials, it’s great to find out what floats and what sinks.
- Or take different containers and find out with the children that they have different volumes and sometimes more or less water fits in.
- Air is also a wonderful element to experiment with. Drop light and heavy objects (nothing valuable, of course, and on a surface that cannot be damaged) and discover together how differently a feather and a stone fall. The ball bounces back up while the washcloth just stays put.
- Use a handkerchief to craft a parachute for various items and do a feather race blowing.
- An experimental corner quickly becomes a sure-fire success that your child can spend hours with. Make sure there is nothing there that they can hurt themselves with and marvel at the experiments your child can come up with.
Get to know nature in a playful way at preschool age
- Dealing with nature – respectfully – is one of the things that children can be made familiar with at an early age – preferably through their own experience.
- Let children plant something themselves. They enjoy taking responsibility for something that is alive and caring for it. A small corner of a bed or a flower pot is enough for this. You must, of course, make sure that it is not a poisonous plant or one that is too difficult to care for, so as not to discourage the child.
- Children are very inquisitive. Take an identification book with you when you go for a walk and identify trees, plants and birds. This can be used to develop spontaneous games or a rally. Who will find an oak, a dandelion, a blackbird first?
- Let your child consciously experience the seasons. Create a book together in which the change of the year is documented with photos, self-painted pictures and found objects from nature, such as pressed flowers and leaves.
Speaking and reading as preschool games
- The best way for parents to get their child excited about books is to read them patiently over and over again. Look at picture books and encourage the child to engage with the short texts. Some libraries also offer campaigns for parents and children, such as the book babies, where small children are lovingly introduced to books.
- Always give your child something to talk about. A walk, the way to kindergarten or shopping can provide an opportunity for language games. Find funny adjectives that start with the same letter as objects or buildings along the way – the beeping post office and the searching supermarket. Or who sees something that starts with M first?
- Inventing stories is always fun for children and trains their use of grammar and new words. Take any object and let your child invent a story about it. Or make some paper dolls that are always on new adventures.
- Drawing letters and pictures of objects that start with the same letter is also fun for children, as long as it is done in a playful way and without pressure.
Mathematics in preschool
- Dealing with numbers is also fun for children from an early age. Many can count before they start school. Various objects can be the reason for counting or simply the trees on the side of the road.
- A simple game for simple arithmetic is hide and seek. If three items were there before, how many are left after one is hidden?
- Children can also be familiarized with simple geometric shapes. The Lego cube, the spherical ball and the triangular toy roof. Make a box with as many different objects as possible, which can be sorted again and again according to shape, color, size.
