Below are some fun activities that you can do to help your child grow and develop.   

Find activities relating to:

Money and Saving
Language Development
Motor Skills
Creativity
 

Money and Saving

You received from SEED OK music CDs and savings stickers for you and your child. The CDs contain songs, short stories, and games to build money and language skills. We hope you will use these tools to teach your child about saving and their SEED for Oklahoma Kids account. Go to these fun activities and tips from Sesame Street^®:

Saving: For you, for me, for later™ Building a Strong Foundation™ Activity Book™ Guide for Parents™ Topic: Tough Times™ Topic: Sharing™

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Language Development

SEED OK sent books to your home because reading and talking with your child daily is critical for speech and language development. Below are some more fun activities you can do to help your child build language skills.

• Name game: Help your child begin to hear individual sounds in words by playing the name game. You can group family and friends’ names by the letter they begin with, or change the first letter in their names to make up silly, nonsense names

• Trips to new places: Take your child to new places and provide experiences that will encourage them to gain new vocabulary words. A trip to the park or lake will encourage them to talk about the water, the plants, the animals, and how they move and live.

• Alphabet games: Play alphabet games with your child

Lay alphabet cards face down and ask your child to try and find matching cards by turning them over – limit cards to 10

Use alphabet foam letters in the bath tub to spell family names

Draw alphabet letters on the sidewalk with chalk

Hide plastic letters in a tub of sand or rice for your child to find (they could be the letters in your child’s name and you could encourage your child to put the letters in order after they find them)

• Visit your local library: Read a book together.

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Motor Skills

Relax and have fun with your child while helping them build their motor skills. Large motor skills involve movement of the arms, legs, or torso, while small motor skills are those that relate to the coordinated movement of the hands and fingers. It is an important time for children to refine these skills and helpful that adults join them in their activities.

• Play outdoors: Provide your child with daily opportunities to play outdoors so they gain increasing ability to coordinate their large muscles. Protect your child from excessive television, video, or computer games. These stationary activities hamper your child’s growth and development of muscles of the body.

• Play with hands: Develop eye-hand coordination by giving your child opportunities to cut, draw, glue, paint, and play with puzzles at home. Playing with play dough, linking small interlocking blocks, and typing on keyboards also increases a young child’s small motor skills.

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Creativity

Encourage your child to use their imagination and artistic talent in imaginative play. Children learn best when they are encouraged to find new ways to solve everyday problems and share their ideas with others.

• Rhymes: Make up silly nonsense rhymes with your child while you are waiting at the doctor’s office or in line at the grocery store. Think of rhyming words for groceries you have in your cart. You can also make a game of clapping with each syllable of a word and keep track of words that have a “lot of claps.”

• Play with household items: Encourage your child to play at home, using familiar household items and unfamiliar materials. Ask your child, “How else could you use those materials?” “Can you think of a better way to….?

• Directions games: Help your child develop good listening skills by making a game out of it: give them simple, nonsense directions to see if they can catch you saying something silly.  For example, you could say, “Put the socks in the refrigerator (instead of drawer)."

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Other Resources

Oklahoma Parents as Teachers and SEED OK also recommend:

The Third Year: A Calendar of Family Activities for Young Children 

The Parent’s Guide to Pre-Kindergarten - Priority Academic Student Skills (PASS). 

We thank the Oklahoma State Department of Education for the materials presented above and encourage you to visit their website for even more resources!