🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 📅 Seasonal & Temporal Awareness — Decorating for different seasons and occasions builds temporal awareness — understanding that time passes in meaningful cycles — and connects children to the cultural rhythms that community belonging requires.
- 🏆 Pride in Environment — Children who participate in making their environment beautiful develop ownership of and investment in that space — taking better care of it and experiencing the satisfaction of living in a space they helped create.
- 🖐️ Fine Motor Skills — The detailed physical work of decorating — cutting paper precisely, placing items carefully, hanging things level — develops fine motor precision in a context that children find personally meaningful and motivating.
- 🌈 Color & Pattern Recognition — Choosing and combining colors and patterns develops color theory intuition, visual discrimination, and pattern recognition — skills that support art, mathematics (pattern sequences), and detailed visual processing.
About Story Time Felts
Created in 1987 by Lori Whiting, Story Time Felts encourages playful hands-on learning for preschoolers. Each set comes with a story for parents to read, as their preschooler acts out the story on the board. Along with the story are several lessons and extension ideas for making the most out of story time. For example, it gives different suggestions for teaching your preschooler simple addition and subtraction, as well encouraging preschoolers to problem solve. Story Time Felts also includes a list of reading resources, related to theme of each set. Full of vibrant, bright colored pieces and a beautifully detailed background, each set are washable, which is a definite plus with preschoolers!
From the Reviewer
Story Time Felts is Educational
As a former high school teacher, I often feel inept when it comes to educating my preschoolers. I can never think of enough original ideas to help teach them the basics, such as learning their colors, and numbers. However, the extensive list of lessons and activities that accompanied the felt board inspired several fun ideas for teaching my two youngest sons (ages five and two). My two-year-old and I practiced his colors by matching colored cereal pieces to the same color railroad car. We also had fun adding up the number of cars and people on the board, and then did some subtracting, by taking one away at a time. We discussed where we could travel to on a train (to California, to see Grandma and Grandpa) and where we could not travel by train (to the moon.)
Story Time Felts is Fun
Lessons aside, my younger son liked stacking the soft felt pieces in one big tower and placing the clown cutouts inside the pockets of the train pieces. We enjoyed the accompanying story and acting it out on the felt board. My older son enjoyed making his own story with the felt pieces and explaining it to me. Both boys loved the bright colors and detailed pictures of each cutout. For such a simple toy, it entertained my sons far longer than anything with batteries.
What Story Time Felts Offer Preschoolers
Story Time Felts offers preschool development in the following areas: hand-eye coordination, speaking and listening skills, problem solving, math skills of counting, life skills, and creativity, through make-believe. In the hustle and bustle of today’s busy world, Story Time Felts also offers a wonderful opportunity for parents and preschoolers to spend some quality time with one another.
More Story Time Felts
Besides The Littlest Engine, Story Time Felts offers many different themes from which to choose. There are nursery rhymes sets, fairy tales sets, animals sets, alphabet and number sets, as well transportation and dollhouse sets. You can even have a custom felt board set made using your preschooler’s photo.
Educational Articles and tips for using felt boards with preschoolers is available at
www.funfelt.com.
Use these open-ended prompts to extend the learning during or after the activity:
There are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions. The goal is to keep the conversation going, model curious thinking, and give your child practice putting their experience into words.
