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Activity Boxes

34 Our collection of games, puzzles, flash cards, and other activities was getting to be a big pile of MESS. So I came up with a way to sort them all and store them neatly so that the kids could easily grab a box and do something fun. This will serve several purposes: 1) since there are activities for all ages, a preschooler can have a different box every day with fun games to play; 2) a big kid can pull out a box and find an activity to fill their time while waiting for Mom to finish something; or 3) any kid can get a specific box to reinforce skills previously learned.

I bought 12 of these shoe-box size tubs at Wal-Mart for .94 each.

Then I laid them all out on my table and started sorting through games and activities.


One box has tangrams, rods, and lacing buttons. Even the smallest kids like to stack and sort these, and make pictures with them.


This is for the animal box. It has this fun Animal Lotto game, finger puppets, farm animal matching puzzle, and dinosaur activities.


This box has a dress-up bear set, an animal-habitat matching game, and another tangram.



This box is trivia cards of all sorts. We like to pull these out at the dinner table some nights and quiz each other. The kids LOVE it when we do this! Even the little ones like to try to answer questions.

This is the ABC box. Obviously, it needs a little more work, but to start with we've got alphabet flash cards and a letter matching puzzle.


This is just a miscellaneous fun box: stickers, paper, scissors, pencils, etc. I may add some rubber stamps and a glue stick soon.


This box is specifically for baby activities. I love these creation cards. I also like the simple "word" flash cards on the right. They are fun to do with new talkers, to help them learn more vocabulary.


This is the numbers box. It has basic number flash cards, Uno, a number/matching puzzle, and a counting game (see below). I also added assorted buttons for counting. Dominoes are good, too.


This counting game is very simple, but the young preschoolers love it! I got this idea on a Montessori website that I can't remember now.

Some of these things are new, but most of them were acquired over 13 years of having children. We get them at Christmas, birthdays, yards sales, or school supply sales.
I will add labels to the front of the boxes soon (okay, someday).
See what a day in the life of our homeschool looks like here. Visit my other blog, Prairie Sense, for a walk back in time.

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