Get your 5 yr old to focus- shoebox activities

Shoebox Activities

Do you find that your child can’t play a particular game for more than 15 minutes, or that he finds it hard to sit put at dinnertime? It’s really good to allow your kids to run around and learn by exploring their environment, but at some stage they need to learn to sit down and do a specific activity that they’re asked to do.

A great way to start is by giving them shoe box activities.

A shoe box activity is basically an old shoe box filled with one structured activity that a child can do for ten minutes or so. It’s a way to get your child to calm down and learn.

Activities can be as simple as you like- a puzzle, sorting, stringing beads, making a tower- anything. Here’s an example of a simple color sorting activity you could put in a shoebox.

Having a number of shoeboxes which are labelled with a picture, helps a child to choose what they want to do. It also encourages them to put back everything into the shoebox when they are done.

So if your child finds it hard to sit down and do something- find an old shoebox.  It really works!!

Ron