🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 🎨 Creativity & Self-Expression — Making freely chosen creative decisions — which colors, shapes, and materials to use — develops a child's personal artistic voice and the confidence to express original ideas across all areas of life.
- 👁️ Hand-Eye Coordination — Guiding scissors along a line, placing stickers exactly, and painting within a space all require the visual-motor integration that handwriting, sports, and detailed work depend on.
- 🌈 Color & Pattern Recognition — Selecting, mixing, and arranging colors and patterns sharpens visual discrimination — the ability to notice subtle differences — which transfers directly to letter and number recognition in early literacy and math.
- 📐 Spatial Reasoning — Three-dimensional crafts — paper folding, cardboard construction, clay sculpting — develop the spatial intelligence children need for geometry, engineering, and understanding how physical objects relate in space.
Preschool New Year’s Eve Noise Makers are a great way for your preschooler to have fun sharing the New Year celebration with your family. The Preschool New Year’s Eve Noise Makers are very simple to make and lots of fun to play with. After New Years, the noise makers can join your preschooler’s collection of percussion instruments.
Materials You will Need
1 contain with a tight fitting lid such as a coffee can, oatmeal box, or even a frozen juice can
Dried bean or rice or jingle bells
Craft glue that will stick to metal, plastic, or whatever your lid is made of
White construction paper
Scissors
Paint or markers
How to Make It
Step 1:
Cover the container with the white construction paper. Do this by laying the object on the paper and rolling it up. Then mark where it needs to be cut. Glue the paper to the container and let dry
Step 2:
Decorate the container with paints or markers.
Step 3:
Add the dried beans, rice, or jingle bells.
Step 4:
Spread glue where the lid makes contact with the container and glue it well. Let it dry.
Helpful Tips for Parents
Tip 1:
You don’t have to keep your preschooler up until midnight to ring in the New Year. Celebrate before or after dinner. It will still me New Year’s Day when s/he wakes up in the morning. If the noise of midnight celebrations wakes him/her, s/he can always celebrate again.
Tip 2:
It’s better to use jingle bells will a paper container and dried beans or rice with a metal container.
Tip 3:
Your preschooler can add glitter to the decorations on the container if you like.
Tip 4:
Let the whole family join in making these noise makers. It’s great family fun and you can put them away with your decorations to next year.
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The five most important preschool craft skills, in developmental order: 1) Tearing and manipulating paper (develops hand strength and bilateral coordination), 2) Scissor use (bilateral coordination and precision), 3) Gluing (spatial planning and fine motor), 4) Drawing and painting with intention (fine motor and visual-motor integration), 5) Three-dimensional construction (spatial reasoning). These skills directly support handwriting readiness and support every other craft skill the child will develop.
Relax the attachment to recognizable results. A 3-year-old's abstract painting is exactly what it should be — an abstract painting by a 3-year-old. Representational craft (making something that clearly looks like what it's supposed to be) typically develops between ages 4–6. Before that, the value is entirely in the process: the sensory exploration, the mark-making, the material investigation. Asking "tell me about your creation" rather than "what is it?" receives the child's own meaning without implying the result should look like something specific.
