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Give your Preschooler the Edge…

Do you have a child who is Pre-K and you desperately want to give them the edge at school by doing some ‘prep’ work at home with them?  Maybe you have no idea where to start…

Adam is now nearly 3 and we spend a lot of time doing ‘educational’ activities such as sorting and threading and building  and running and climbing and and and…  you get the picture.

He was quite a late speaker (and I use that loosely because I know it was not that late at all) and has only just started stringing words together into little sentences and building his vocabulary fairly quickly.

I had a request to design and make a Mini Office File Folder for a customer’s 2-year old son.  I know what 2-year olds are capable of and didn’t want to make some thing that would be overwhelming for him and it would only get used in a year or two.  It is for this reason that I thought to make it interactive!

While designing it,  got more and more excited at the thought of using it…so guess what…I had to make one for Adam too.

It is interactive in the sense that you can choose a focus topic for the day or week, and ‘separate’ that focus topic from the rest of the information in the file.  Let me show you what I mean…

Do you see those magnetic strips under the concepts?  That is where to place the focus topic.  Initially I thought to use sticky back velcro, but then they were out of stock at my local store, so it made me think more about it and this is WAY better!  Adam attaches a paper clip to the desired image (great fine motor!!!) and then sticks it to the strip.  So for example, the focus color for this week is purple:

He searched for the purple block followed by 3 purple images (he still had to find one more).  In this above image you can see the Letter A and number 5 are part of our focus.  
The additional strip under My Body will be used for pictures we cut out of magazines of a body part or 2D /3D shapes, depending on what we are focusing on.  (Once again making the magnetic strips and paper clips more versatile than the velcro).

This page of the folder shows how it can be used to practice names.  There is also a little astronaut (Adam, where has it gone??) that moves up and down the day of week and month.

Further use for when they are older:

I included an extra set of letters so that once your child has moved past the information on the board, you can encourage writing words with the letters on the magnetic strips e.g.  Write a word that starts with a c (maybe give them a picture in the beginning), they can write a simple CVC word like cat.  Or think of something that is gray and write the word, which could be bat.

If you think you could use this Mini Office Folder, you can purchase it here.

Or if you would like a Princess Theme version, get it here.

This specific one has a theme of space, but I am more than willing to adapt it to any theme you require!  Let me know by sending me  an email (margauxlangenhoven@gmail.com) and I’ll make it my priority!

3 Responses

  3. Hi. Thank you for your comment. Unfortunately, Disney is copyright so I am not able to use their images to create a product. I am, however, open to create other themes which are not under copyright law.
    Happy Teaching!

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I am an online teacher, passionate about creating fun and engaging activities for ESL students.  I live in South Africa with my husband, two children and a handful of pets.  

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