Make Your Own Preschool Games

Book excerpt: Nearly 90% of all brain growth occurs in the first five years of life. Parents can capitalize on this impressionable time by improving and varying the sights, sounds, and smells in a child's immediate surroundings. With this eminently practical guide in hand, parents can actively promote the motor, cognitive, and social skills that will make a difference in a child's readiness for formal, academic learning later on. Ideal for busy parents, Make Your Own Preschool Games describes quick and inexpensive-to-make activities that can be assembled from materials found at home -- paper cups, bottle caps, clothespins, magazines, shoeboxes, and grocery bags. Designed to be used as part of dynamic play, these games will help expand a child's math, science, art, music, language, reading, and writing knowledge while providing the necessary and fun one-on-one bonding time that every child craves with her parents.