Helpful Tips for Parents

• Read aloud daily for at least 15 minutes. This single habit is the strongest predictor of kindergarten reading readiness and long-term academic success.

• Answer "why" questions fully and honestly. A child who gets real answers to their questions develops deeper curiosity than one whose questions are dismissed or oversimplified.

• Screen learning (educational apps and videos) supplements but never replaces human interaction as a teaching medium. Learning happens most efficiently in social, conversational contexts.

• Mistakes are how children learn. A classroom and home that treat mistakes as information rather than failure produces more confident, persistent learners.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I support a gifted preschooler who seems to need more than peers?

Gifted preschoolers benefit from depth rather than acceleration — instead of teaching next-year's content, provide deeper engagement with current concepts. A preschooler fascinated by numbers doesn't need grade-school arithmetic; they benefit from mathematical puzzles, spatial reasoning challenges, and mathematical exploration at their own depth. Social-emotional support is equally important: gifted preschoolers often have asynchronous development (advanced intellectually but emotionally typical for their age) and need appropriate peer interaction alongside intellectual challenge.

Related reading: See also our writing readiness guide and our alphabet activities for more ideas on this topic.

🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop

• 📖 Story Structure Understanding — Understanding that stories have a beginning, problem, solution, and ending develops narrative comprehension — the mental schema children use to make sense of increasingly complex texts throughout their school years.
• 📚 Pre-Reading Skills — Activities that involve letters, sounds, rhymes, and print directly build the phonological awareness and letter knowledge that are the two strongest predictors of successful reading development.
• 🧠 Memory & Recall — Remembering rules, retelling a story in sequence, and practicing skills to automaticity builds working memory and long-term recall — the cognitive foundation that learning in every subject depends on.
• ⚡ Executive Function — Planning, sequencing steps, holding rules in mind while acting, and stopping a prepotent response all build executive function — the cluster of cognitive skills most strongly predictive of long-term academic and life success.

Preschoolers love to paint. They paint with paintbrushes, stamps, and their fingers. They love the feel of the paint and the textures they can create with different materials. Preschoolers make sense of their world and the things that interest them through art. In a world that is largely too big for them, preschoolers can express their feelings and create something that is uniquely theirs.

Painting of all sorts is a wonderful open-ended art activity. It allows the preschooler to take charge. They are in control and they can let their imagination run wild, rather than following strict cut and paste guidelines.

What You Need

The bottom of a cardboard box

Large or small marbles

Paint

Paper

Paper plate or plastic bowl

What To Do

For this activity, you need the bottom of a cardboard box or the lid of a box with a rim around it tall enough to keep the marbles in the box. I find that the lids to printer paper boxes work really well for this. They are already the right size since they were designed to hold paper and you don't have to do any additional cutting to make it small enough for preschoolers to control.

Place the piece of paper in the bottom of the box. Fill the paper plate or plastic bowl with the paint of your choice. You can either roll the marbles in the paint or paint them with a paint brush. Drop the marbles into the box, on top of the paper, and let the preschoolers hold the box with two hands and tilt it back and forth. The marbles will roll around and create an exciting design.

Variations

For younger preschoolers, or if you don't want to deal with the mess of coating the marbles in paint, you can follow the same instructions above. Instead of coating the marbles in paint, squirt some paint directly on top of the paper inside the box. Drop the clean marbles into the box and tilt the box so they roll around the paper. To create different designs squirt different colors of paint on different places on your paper. Try several variations and see what kind of designs you can come up with.

Preschoolers enjoy painting with something a little different. It makes painting an entirely new activity. This art activity can be altered to fit several preschool themes. After you have used the marbles to paint the paper, allow it to dry, and then cut it into various shapes. Some easy formations are eggs, shapes, masks, hands, feet, and apples.

Hi! I'm Rachel Lister, the Preschool Education writer at PreschoolRock.com. I live in Utah with my husband and two beautiful boys. When my oldest son was born, I quit my teaching job and opened a home daycare and preschool. I love to help preschoolers learn about the world around them. They make life interesting and I can't imagine doing anything different. If you have any ideas, suggestions or comments, feel free to contact me.