Review & Giveaway!

Review & Giveaway! Preschool Activities in a Bag, Book 1

Preschoolers. . . Gotta love their energy! The world is an adventure and they are total sponges, absorbing everything that is around them. While this boundless exuberance can be a joy to behold and witness, at times it can also be a tad annoying. If you have ever been in a waiting room, a doctor’s office, in church or on an airplane with a preschooler, you have felt my pain. Or maybe you are a veteran homeschooling mom, attempting to teach multiple levels of older students with your preschooler demanding to be a part of it all, but really just driving everyone nuts. In situations like these, what’s a poor parent to do? Enter Preschool Activities In a Bag! (insert deep super hero announcer voice here)

Preschool Activities In a Bag, Book 1 is a compilation of over 30 different activities and games that are perfect for children under the age of six – but don’t be surprised if your older students ask to get in on the fun, too! Paula Reetz and Sherri MacLean designed each bag to contain self-guided activities that your children can do by themselves with minimal parental interaction. There are 11 main skill sets that are learned and enhanced with the activities: 123 Order, ABC Order, Color, Consumable, Motor Skills, Hand/Eye Coordination, Matching, Observation, Patterning, Puzzle and Sorting. One of the things that I love about this book is all of the helpful charts and descriptions that allow you to see at a glance what activities touch on what skill sets. If your child is having difficulty with motor skills, for example, you can quickly scan the chart and see there are 19 activities that focus on this skill. If your child is struggling with hand/eye coordination, you can tell which of the activities (there are 8 of them) would be good for your student to work on to develop this skill. Thus, the bags are not only fun for your children, and a much needed diversion, but they are very educational!

Another one of the reasons why I am now singing the praises of this book, and its authors, is the importance placed on community. They devote a significant part of the book to helping you coordinate an Activity Swap. Being homeschool moms themselves, Paula and Sherri understand the budget constraints and need for community that homeschooling brings. They encourage you to get a group together to share in the cost and production of the bags, and have some fun while doing so! To get the full experience of this program, I coordinated a group of my own through some local co-ops and met some wonderful women in my local area that I wouldn’t have met otherwise. The moms were enthusiastic to participate and commented how much fun it was to put the activities together.

The book says that the activities were designed to keep the cost around $1 per bag, and for the most part we found this to be true. . . some moms were even able to put the bags together completely utilizing items they had around the house!

Now to review the actual activities, although from this mom’s point of view, the fun of putting them together and socializing with other preschool moms would be well worth the price of admission. For our swap, we were able to put together 9 activities to test and my girls and I added a few more. As the budget allows, we will definitely be adding more of the activities, and there is already talk from the group of getting back together for another swap. We did make sure for testing purposes that we did at least one activity for each skill set, with many overlapping. From my personal experience with my girls, ages 3 and 2, these activities do exactly what they say they are designed to teach.

There are a few activities that are easier and more fun from the onset, but overall I was very pleased with the results. My girls surprised me with what they were able to do on their own and they get excited whenever they see the box of activity bags on the table. Initially I wasn’t impressed with a couple of the bags, judging by my girls shorter attention spans with them, but then my husband and I realized that they were simply more challenging and are indeed teaching them skills that need work. I also like the fact that many of the activities can be open ended. Each bag does come with a label that includes the name of the activity, what skill it was designed to develop and the intended directions, but I have found that you can tailor these for the individual student. For example, for the Fabric Pattern Card Activity, we simply work on matching skills with my two year old. For my three year old, we make things a bit more complicated and work on shapes and textures as well. For Match the Bead, one of the participants noted that her older children wanted to make it a bit more challenging, so they designed a color sequencing chart for them to duplicate.

Overall, I would say that this is definitely a quality investment that has so many uses. When you need to clean the house, cook dinner or have a Calgon moment, these bags are not only great “boredom busters” but are valuable teaching tools as well. It definitely gets this mommy’s recommendation!

Activity Bags has generously donated a kit for us to give away to a lucky reader. The enter the contest, leave a comment telling us about your favorite activity to do with your preschooler.

Comments will be closed Friday evening and the winner will be announced on Sunday in our brand new weekly newsletter. So please go subscribe! As always please make sure you leave your email address or that it is listed on your profile or blog. If we can't email you, you can't win this fun package.