Learning Preschool Skills with Cookie Cutters
There are days. Days where I wonder how am I going to get all four of these crazy children to learn all the skills that they need? How can I possibly come up with fun ideas for them all, so that they are not stuck with workbooks day after day? And then there are days when it just all comes together and I’m reminded that school doesn’t have to be “deep” and I don’t need to create “new” ideas every day. There are also days when I remember that even the most common household items can be used for learning. Like this awesome set of star cookie cutters. They are meant for creating a sugar cookie Christmas tree with all the different sized layers. But they are also great for teaching a preschooler about sizes!
Materials needed for Cookie Cutter Learning:
You can start by letting your preschooler explore the cookie cutters, let her slip one cookie cutter inside of another. Or try to fit a too big cookie cutter into a smaller one. This is a great introductory lesson. (And it doesn’t involve pencil and paper!)
You can also have your preschooler line up the stars from smallest to biggest or biggest to smallest. If it seems too much to use all ten cookie cutters start with five that are obviously different in size and increase the number to create a challenge.
You can also have your child close their eyes while you lay out a few cookie cutters in size order leaving gaps for more to fit in. Give them a choice of 2-3 cookie cutters to insert into the order.
For an older child these cookie cutters would be perfect for teaching skip counting by 5s as the kids add up how many points there are on the stars.
Or as an introduction to multiplication. If you have 3 stars how many points do you have? What is a math problem that would help you solve that problem?
And even division. If you have 30 points altogether how many stars do you have?
So let me encourage you, that if you feel like school lessons are becoming mundane or you can’t come up with “fresh” material, look around you. What can you use differently? What is a simple thing, like these cookie cutters, that you can add to your day to get a new perspective of learning?
