🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop

• 🎨 Creativity & Imagination — Open-ended activities that let children direct their own play grow creative thinking, original problem solving, and the confidence to express personal ideas.
• 💬 Language Development — Narrating play, hearing new vocabulary, and describing what they're doing dramatically expands children's language range and the sentence complexity they'll bring to reading and conversation.
• 🎯 Focus & Attention — Sustaining engagement with an activity long enough to complete it builds the voluntary attention control that children need for listening in class, reading, and all forms of academic learning.
• 📐 Spatial Reasoning — Thinking about how objects relate in space — fitting shapes together, building structures, filling containers — develops the spatial intelligence that predicts success in mathematics and STEM fields.

Even if your weather doesn't permit you to barbecue anymore, you can still have fun, tasty s'mores made indoors without all the mess. The preschool food activity allows your child to be creative with only a few ingredients.

What You Need

Large marshmallows
Wooden skewers
Milk chocolate bars
Graham cracker crumbs
Plastic food storage bag
Wax paper
Large plates or cookie sheets
Tall microwavable cup or container

What To Do

Step 1: Place two to three marshmallows on each wooden skewer.

Step 2: Place two to three graham cracker squares into plastic food storage bag. Close bag and crush the crackers into crumbs.

Step 3: Pour crumbs onto cookie sheet or large flat plate.

Step 4: Put chocolate into tall microwave safe cup and melt in microwave (how long depends on power of your microwave).

Step 5: Dip marshmallows (on skewers) into melted chocolate and then roll in graham cracker crumbs.

Step 6: Let cool on cookie sheet covered with wax paper

Step 7: Eat and enjoy!

To Make Them Festive For The Holidays

For Halloween or Thanksgiving, add some orange and black sprinkles or sugar to the graham cracker crumbs. For Christmas, you can add green or red spinkles or sugar. You can also crush up some candy canes to add to the crumbs for a great peppermint-flavored s'mores.

More Preschool Food Activities

Fun With Noodles
Let your preschooler experiment with textures, shapes, colors and smells with this fun food activity -- playing with pasta. Your child can spend hours creating art with cooked noodles.

Harvest Marshmallow Pumpkins
One of the great things about autumn is the beautiful color in the scenery outdoors. Well bring that color indoors in an easy treat that will not only tempt your preschooler, but other adults too.

Hidden Treat Cupcakes
Nothing says surprise more than cupcakes with a special treat hidden within. This fun food is great to make for your family or for your preschooler's afterschool treat or a party.

Don't Throw These Snowballs Cookies
Nothing is more exciting to make during the winter than snowball cookies. This easy family favorite allows your preschooler to have fun making a tasty treat.

Chocolate Chip Cookies For One
Looking for a chocolate chip cookie recipe that is just for one person? This yummy recipe makes up to two dozen nutty, chocolatey cookies -- perfect for a small gift for someone or even yourself.

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I'm Mary Beth P. Adomaitis, the Preschool Activities writer and associate editor for Preschoolrock.com. As a mom of a preschooler, I love hearing from other parents and teachers of preschoolers. If you have any preschool activity ideas, suggestions or questions, feel free to contact me.

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Helpful Tips for Parents - Follow your child's lead. If they transform the planned activity into something else entirely, that redirect shows creative thinking — go with it. - Outdoor activities should be a daily priority year-round. Research consistently links outdoor time to better attention, mood, and sleep in preschoolers. - Narrate what your child is doing during activities: "You're sorting the red blocks from the blue ones." This vocabulary exposure accelerates language development. - The clean-up is part of the activity. Involve children in restoring the space — it develops responsibility and makes future activities easier to launch. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What activities are best for siblings of different ages? Activities that allow each sibling to engage at their own developmental level work best: building with blocks (toddler stacks, preschooler builds structures, older child engineers complex designs), art (each makes what they can), baking (each has an age-appropriate task). Avoid activities where one sibling's participation spoils the other's — matching academic difficulty is the main conflict source. Physical activities with a cooperative rather than competitive structure are usually most successful across age gaps. ### How long should a preschooler's activity session last? Most preschoolers engage most deeply in 20–40 minute activity windows. Shorter sessions don't allow for the warming-up and deepening that makes activities richest; longer ones risk overtiredness. Watch the child's engagement rather than the clock — the right time to end is when engagement is still high, before it drops. Related reading: See also our obstacle course ideas and our painting ideas for more ideas on this topic.