Back to School Dream Bin Activity Guide

We are so excited about our Back to School Dream Bin. It includes a lot of the essentials and tools that a child in preschool-second grade would use in a traditional classroom setting. 

The Dream Bin includes:

Alphabet letters, dice, crayons, coloring book, sight word flash cards, posted notes, dry erase board and marker, laminated name tag, and back to school themed stickers. 

We have used many if not all of these to play games and work on different skills with out kids so we thought it was the perfect combination of tools parents could use this fall with their kids. 

Some of our favorite activities have been doing the ABC scavenger hunt. Use the posted notes and write the ABCs. Place them throughout your house and have your kids hunt for them. Once they find the notes, have them put them in order. We usually hang them on our door wall, but you can do it anywhere- a wall, the floor, cupboards- wherever you can fit them the best! It is really fun for the kids and they even try to make it a little competition (if siblings are involved) on how can find more letters. So much fun!

Brady will be entering kindergarten in the fall, and has been working on the sight word flash cards we got at a round up meeting in early March. We practice every day usually before bed. He has many of them memorized now but I still spend time repeating them and using them in sentences. I have found that incorporating a book and having him point to all the sight words he sees makes it fun for him to notice how many sight words are really in books! (so using our counting skills too).

This is the first step in facilitating reading comprehension. Every child is different and if flash cards seem to not work well as an exercise, I have also incorporated nerf guns with sight words. What you need: index cards, marker, and tape. Write sight words on a card and post them on a wall. Call out a sight word, have your child locate it on the wall and shoot the nerf gun at the word. Hey whatever it takes :) 

Another tool are our laminated name cards. Each day when Brady went to school, he was asked to write his first name. Once he mastered it after spending a few months tracing and writing free-hand, he moved on to his last name. This is a great routine to get into first thing in the morning with your child. We have done this over the summer and it really does help improve their fine motor skills and writing skills. 

I plan to include some more activity ideas on this blog but this is a great start for those of you who have the bin! Don't forget to tag us on your pictures when your playing with the bins. We love to see how much learning is happening in other's homes. 

#celebrateeverydayfun #sweetmittendreams

Themes & Dreams,

Julie