Preschoolers have a natural inclination to be silly. They like to rhyme words meaninglessly, make up new words, and come up with new words for every day objects.

Kids this age may be too young to appreciate any “real”jokes or riddles, the kind that make older children laugh. What you can do at this age is to encourage their natural silliness. Here are some ways you can encourage a preschoolers sense of fun and laugh with her.

1. Play “silence” games. Everybody sits in a room, not saying anything. The one who laughs first is out of the game. The laughter is even more contagious when there is more than one child in the room.
2. Share funny things that happened during the day with your kids. Tripped on a step at the supermarket? Your preschooler will find it hilarious!
3. Share comic strips in the newspaper that are about hilarious kids his age, like Calvin and Hobbes.
4. Play what if? games. Create outlandish scenarios. What if she was in charge of the house for a day? What if your pet was a dinosaur?
5. Tag any day of the week as “special.” Have a Roller Skating Day when you wheel yourselves around the house. Or a “Blender Day” when you whip up juices together. Let her come up with her own ideas for the Day.
6. Laugh at her jokes, even if it takes her 20 minutes to get to the punch line. It’s important for her to know that she has the power to make others smile.
7. Place an empty carton at the door way, and insist that she has to crawl through the carton and into the house every time she wants to come in that day. Encourage her natural playfulness.

Above all, have fun!

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!