Activity Corner - Easy & Educational Activities for under 5's

Hello! I’m Rachel, and one of Beebies Ambassadors. I am also mummy to two little boys (and another on the way!). I used to be a primary school teacher and have a love of learning through play. Every fortnight, I will be sharing activities and crafts aimed at under five’s, that are not also great fun but encourage learning in some way.
To give you a taste of what to expect, here are some of our favourite activities so far!

Name Rockets

We still have these rockets up on the wall in our playroom/dining room now. It was an incredibly simple activity. First of all, we blobbed paint onto black paper to make stars. I had written the letters of their name on little squares of paper, and had written their name on a big piece of paper. They had to find the letters and stick them down in the right order. This activity was perfect for name and letter recognition, but can also be used to talk about shapes (we used squares and triangles) and colours.

Playdough and Pasta

This was one of the first ever ‘invitations to play’ we did, way before I started blogging but one we go back to on a regular basis. The resources needed are minimal – playdough, dried spaghetti and dried pasta tubes. You can also use cheerios. I literally left the resources on the table and left them to it – within no time they were sticking the spaghetti into the playdough and threading cheerios and pasta on. An excellent activity for practising those all important fine motor skills!

Colour Sorting and Recognition

All we needed for this activity, which focuses on recognising and sorting colour, is a piece of paper divided up and a selection of coloured stickers. The kids put the stickers in the right box depending on the colour. They absolutely loved this, and we’ve done it several times now. This could be adapted in many ways as well – you could sort according to shape or size instead of colour.

Hopefully this has given you a taste of things to come - come back for more ideas soon!