In these special days the great concern for us parents is: what to propose to the children?

How to make these already psychologically heavy days fun, constructive and light?

Below we suggest some activities to do at home with 4-year-olds.

Creative Activities With 4-Year-Olds

Creative expression is an activity recommended for all ages, but it is at age 4 that drawing becomes more structured. In fact, the child learns to reproduce what he sees around him: he depicts the most popular people, houses, cars and animals but, above all, he represents his emotions.

Drawing becomes for him a real means of communication.

Working these days at home with gouache paints , markers , crayons and pencils will help us not only to spend quality time but also to understand how our children are experiencing this moment.

Start from a drawing idea that you will choose together, it could also be the beautiful rainbow #we’ll do it , then ask your child to customize the drawing with free elements ( we made it with the paints you find here ).

The child will feel stimulated in his creativity and guided at the same time.

And then how beautiful it is to fill our windows and balconies with rainbows full of hope!

Writing And Language Activities

Precisely starting from creativity it is possible to develop pre-graphic activities.

Among the tools we suggest you use there are certainly sandboards . This is because, through this type of game, in which his hands are in contact with an attractive material such as sand, the child is stimulated to carry out an activity that in different contexts he might find boring and difficult.

Another tool, which combines creativity and prescription, are the stencils of letters and numbers, perfect for use with tempera and markers.

The four-year-old has an excellent command of language, knows many words and builds sentences using prepositions. In this phase of development it is therefore important to train the language by combining it with the concept of association and sequentiality.

So play with pictures, with books. We suggest the Cause and Effect bingo , which shows 18 situations each represented in 2 images, which scene caused the other? What happened first? What is the result of this action? The children will have to associate the cards of the various couples and explain the connection between them, motivating the temporal and causal relationship.

Mathematical Activity For 4 Year Olds

“The Mathematical Mind is active from the first years of a child’s life: in our little children the evidence of a mathematical inclination manifests itself in many surprising and spontaneous ways”

Well yes, even if we find it hard to believe that mathematics has always been within us 😊 This is what Maria Montessori argued.

This does not mean that we have to give our 4-year-olds very complicated math puzzles, multiplication and multiplication tables. However, we can provide them with some tools to support the study and learning of mathematics, suitable for their age.

Among these I suggest:

• The bingo of numbers , an educational game designed to learn the numbers from 1 to 10. Children will have to associate the number of animals represented on the table, with the number of the card (represented both in numbers and graphically as a domino tile)
• Euro to count in a jar : they allow children to learn about our banknotes and to practice the calculation and knowledge of money through practical and concrete use. They are also a fantastic symbolic game, perfect for free play moments
• The construction multicubi wood are useful for early mathematical exercises: allow you to clearly display units and combining the cubes, creating rulers and compare quantities and sizes. Also suitable for seriation exercises. The choice of 2 specific Montessori-inspired colors aims to focus the child’s attention on the exercise rather than on the playful aspect of the aid

Read, Read, Read

And finally, let’s use this time at home with the children to teach them a love of reading. How nice it will be for them to explore, albeit without moving, different universes and situations.

How thrilling to be a prince one day, a queen one day and a lion again the other.

Reading is important… and it is beautiful! It’s really cool and kids would read a book a day if they found out how good it is.

It is our job to teach them. We recommend these readings:

• Zeb and the supply of kisses : Zeb leaves for the summer camp and mom and dad prepare him a supply of kisses to overcome any sadness. But the supply of kisses will console not only Zeb but also many of his travel companions.

• Pezzettino is a cult of children’s reading. The protagonist, Pezzettino, is in search of his own identity. In fact, he is so small in comparison to his friends – all big and big, capable of flying, swimming, climbing – that he is convinced that he is a piece of someone else. Thus begins a search that, in the end, will lead him to exclaim, filled with amazement and happiness, “I am myself!”