If your preschooler lives close to her maternal or paternal grandparents, or other relatives, great! If she doesn’t, it can be hard to keep close relatives present in spirit, if not physically.

Here are some ways to keep those family bonds fresh:

1. Make a family tree chart in your child’s room, and paste pictures of grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Keep the tree simple and uncluttered. Include only family members she’s met already.
2. If her grandparents don’t mind being called at odd hours, paste their pictures in a special address book just for her, and write their telephone numbers next to the names. She can call them whenever she feels like.
3. Place pictures of relatives liberally all over the house – in frames, on bulletin boards, the refrigerator.
4. Pore through family albums together.
5. Let her make her own special personalized album with all her favorite people. Ask her grandparents or uncles and aunts to write special messages to her in the album.
6. Take a large map of the country (or world) and paste pictures of family members at the places they are at. It’s easy for a child to understand why she can’t meet her relatives everyday when she sees exactly where they are on the map, and how far from her.
7. Take all her dolls and teddies and let her make “her family” out of them, assigning relatives’ names to each doll or toy.

Enjoy!

Taking temperature readings of the weather outside may be a little too much for preschoolers who can’t really “see” temperature. But your child can see the clouds, feel the rain on his face, and the chill in his fingers when when snow falls. He can see when it’s foggy, and he knows when it’s windy outside.

To establish the concepts of weather, make a weather chart for your child. Make separate rows for each day of the month, and let her decorate with weather symbols – rain, clouds, sun etc. Then, let her use colored stickers to denote the weather outside – blue for a rainy day, black for cloudy weather, yellow for a sunny day, white for snow, and so on. She can even use combinations of stickers to denote a day that started out sunny, but ended up dark and gloomy – a half yellow sticker and a half black sticker. Let he do this every morning.

For an older child, you can take temperature readings, and record these too.

Make sure you hang the weather chart at her eye level – kids like to see what they are taking part in!

Have fun!

Getting preschoolers to brush their teeth is easier said than done. To get your child to brush longer than the eight seconds she usually does, name all the foods that she ate that day (or the previous day in the case of early morning), and ask her to remove each of these from her teeth. You’ll get a few extra precious brushing moments out of her.

If the two of you brush together, see how many faces the two of you can make as you brush – make a game of it; she’ll end up brushing her teeth for longer. Sneaky, but may work (at least for a while!).

Call out the names of family members, her favorite cartoon characters, her dolls, and ask her to look for these at the back of her mouth with her toothbrush. It might make those much ignored places easier to reach and clean.

This weekend, look through old pictures of your preschooler and the family, and select a few.  Make copies of these in black and white.  Staple a bunch of these copies, and give them to your child to use as a coloring book. Painting is more fun when she’s coloring the dog or the cake at her birthday party!

Here are some more ways you can encourage kids to exercise and strengthen those important small finger muscles, so necessary for writing.

1. Do string play activities.
2. Do puzzles that require her to pick up small pieces and move them to their correct position.
3. Shell peas.
4. Work that play dough – give her beads and buttons to exercise those muscles.
5. Practice tying shoe laces. It may be frustrating at first, but every time she tries to lace them up, she’s working those very important muscles.

…?” asked the bard.

A mighty lot, especially when it comes to a preschooler’s name. Your child’s name, to her, is besides mama or daddy, the only one which is of any consequence to her. We might get over the initial excitement of looking for a perfect baby name, and get used to calling out her’s as time goes by. For her, it’s her identity - a familiar voice calling out her name or seeing her name on a gift package label, or on the inside first page of a book, means more to your child then you know.

Use it often -

• In conversations with her, or drop it within her earshot when you’re talking to others.
• Display it liberally and prominently at home – use alphabet cutouts to display it on the walls of her room, or in shimmering letters on the bedroom door.
• Have it monogrammed onto her towels, and napkins.
• Paint it on her place mats at the dining table.
• Write it on the first inner page of each of her books.
• Look for all the letters of her name on store signs, bill boards etc. Older preschoolers won’t need any prompting from you.
• Write it out on a piece of cardboard, in large block letters and paint in bright colors. Cut out the piece of cardboard into random shapes – use it as her very own name puzzle to put together!