Preschool at Home: Don't Spend a Lot of Money

One of the first mistakes many of us make when schooling from home, is thinking we need to go and buy as many learning tools as we can. Yes, there are things that will need to be purchased...but let's be smart with our spending.

In my attempts to keep this year's learning meaningful without breaking the bank, I have picked up a few tricks along the way to help me with this goal. First of all, thank you, Pinterest! I love all the fun ideas on there that, often, don't require a lot of (if any) purchasing. Second, I am thankful for Hobby Lobby and their weekly 40% off coupon. Third, always be on the look out for sales.

Pinterest has so many great ideas, often using things you already have at home.

Like tracing letters with a Q-tip and paint.




Here are a few things I have picked up from Hobby Lobby with my coupon (or with a 50% sale they were having on the product).

Some dot paint is fun for learning. Little ones love it anytime they get to use paint.



We used them this week for working on patterns:




Foam building blocks were fun to use when we were describing shapes and comparing the differences in them. Lil' Man loved building with them after the shape lesson was done. Remember to let the little ones explore learning through play.

They are also great at entertaining Miss Priss while Lil' Man is doing school.



These are stamps I already had when I was scrapbooking (now I do it digitally). I did use my coupon when I purchased them. We used these to practice stamping our name a few weeks ago. Next week, we will be using them to build our sight words we are working on.



Sales are awesome. I love a good sale. Here are some great buys I found for our learning time:

I found this tub of dinosaurs at Lakeshore...on sale. I was excited because they were on sale, but also, Lil' Man loves dinosaurs. I knew we could do a multitude of activities with these and his interest would stay piqued.

So far,

We used them to make patterns



Sort by color (which you can sort these by many different ways...great sorting manipulatives)



We also used them this week when working on our number sense activity.



Then there are the sales I ran into while grocery shopping. Which, by the way, after the "back-to-school shopping high" is over...you will find GREAT deals.

These little index card boxes are great for storing things in. I have one for number tiles, one for sight word cards, one for letter cards...I'm still deciding on what to use the other one for.



Find these on sale...BUY them!



We use them for a lot of things. Making word building tiles is one of them.

I found (and when I say "found", I mean digging-through-the-sale-bin kind of "found") this fun little calendar.




All sale hunting/finding aside... Don't forget about your local library! There are soooo many resources to use, FREE.

These are some of the books we checked out...two of them are for the rhyming skill we are working on and one is going along with the apple theme we are doing.



A DVD that we can watch to help us learn our sight words.



Oh, I would be remiss if I did not mention another great learning tool. Food.


Lil' Man loves that we use m&m's...he hates that we don't use them often.





Happy schooling!


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