DIY: Crafty ideas for teaching young kids

When trying to teach toddlers a few pre-kinder skills it's best to have a few tricks in your bag. Young kids tend to learn best and are more motivated to try new things when concepts are presented to them in a fun way. One of the most important goals for us parents is raising our kids to be life-long learners and how better to achieve this than by showing our kids that learning is in fact fun.

That's why I love Craftsanity's educational crafting for kids post. They've compiled three ideas with instructions, links and video for crafting a few tools to use with young kids to develop fine motor skills, letter recognition and basic writing and reading skills. The crafts are all cheap, quick and easy to put together using items mostly found around the house.

My 3 year old daughter is obsessed with letter writing (mostly her name right now) and markers so I can't wait to make her one of the dry erase boards using a plastic sleeve and felt eraser. And I'm sewing up a felt board for her to take in the car next week when we hit the road on an 8 hour drive to grandmother's house for our Thanksgiving adventure. These great ideas are no-brainers...Crafting + educating = learning through playing.