Help Kids Tell a Story with an Experience Book

My daughter loves making books and telling stories, though she usually doesn’t get more than a couple of pages done before she moves on to the next project.

I love the idea of collaborating on a book where I take pictures of an event or outing, she writes the story (which could just be the child telling you what they liked or remembered most about the day rather than literally having them write down a story) and you combine the words and images into a little book they wrote and may be able to read themselves.

Parenting Chaos calls these experience books, and they’re a great way to get kids who might not be able to read and write on their own yet to tell a story and share their experiences and feelings. It also makes a keepsake that you and your child will love to have in later years.

Do you make books with your kids? I’d love to hear about it.

[Photo via Parenting Chaos.]

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Summer Reading Printables and Tips for Parents

Giving math a holiday twist is fun for kids of any age, but little ones especially will have more fun learning math concepts when there’s a bit of Christmas involved. Check out more Christmas math activities for older kids here.

Teaching Mama has a great set of printable Christmas activities for preschoolers, most of with have some connection to math. There’s connect the dots, repeating patterns, counting, color by number, number puzzles and more. And it’s totally free!

Practice counting by making candy canes with pipe cleaners and beads. This is such an easy activity and a great idea, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Get all the details from Nurture Store. You could also turn these into little wreaths or other holiday shapes if you want.

Print out the counting mats from Living Life and Learning, grab some festive little pompoms or other counters (Christmas erasers, coins in red and green, whatever you have handy) and kids can practice counting numbers from 1 to 12 and working on one to one correspondence.

Preschool Play and Learn has a similar idea using Christmas tree shapes, but these don’t have spaces for you to add the decorations, just numbers for the number to add to each one. These are meant to be playdough mats, but you could also use pom poms, beads or even miniature Christmas ornaments to decorate your trees while you count to 20.

Or try these printable Christmas number puzzles from Math Kids and Chaos. The two-part puzzles feature a number on one side and the same number of some Christmas-themed thing on the other side. The edges of the pieces only match with the one that’s correct. You could combine this one with a counting activity to have kids count out the number of counters that the numeral shows, then match with the piece that shows that number of things and count them again. The set includes puzzles with numbers one to 10 and ten frames with numbers one to 20.

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