Felt board stories have long been a great way to show kids stories without using books. You have to remember that kids get distracted a lot, and even though books are great, they can get bored of them. That is why we use other ways to entertain them. Anyhow back to felt boards. There are a few reasons felt boards are awesome.

First of all, kids can interact with the characters and props. They can actually pick them up and move them around and tell the story themselves. This encourages them to be imaginative themselves and add to a story. It also gives you (the parent) a break from telling the stories.

Felt boards are fun. You can combine characters and items and story lines from different books. It is a visual aid that the kids can follow instead of the pictures in books.

They are visual aids. Just like white boards that are used to teach as much as black boards now, felt boards are still that useful in teaching preschoolers. Colors, numbers, letters, mathematics, spelling and more can be taught with the visual aids of felt boards. You can't imagine the possibilities. Go to your craft store and grab some felt today, and to get you going I have found some great stories for you to get started with.

You really want to use your imagination when it comes to preschoolers, especially if you want to encourage them to use theirs. Take for instance playing games with them. We often do the games where you throw some kind of small soft object and aim for a basket, bucket or tote of some kind. This gets them moving and happy, especially if afterwards you give them some kind of treat or small toy for winning, all of the children win of course. They get really excited, you can play music in the background and get them dancing and throwing at the same time. You are also teaching them to share and take turns.

We also play memory, the age old game of flipping cards over and matching them up, we do it a little different though, we only use about half of the cards. The kids seem to get too overwhelmed when there are too many cards to choose from and remember. As they get older you can add more back to the game. They like to just look at the cards too, count them, pick out the different pictures, choose their favorites, etc. You can always squeeze in colors, shapes, conversation about people and other things with cards like these. Basically you have to look at these things as jumping off points.

With all of these ideas, the sky is the limit, your imagination can lead you to teaching all sorts of things to preschoolers, and they love to learn and be able to use their imagination as well. Just try it out, then find other people who are teaching too and share your ideas.

Another thing you can do is considered classroom games, File Folder Games. File folder games are games that are printed on regular printer paper and pasted into your file folders (such as those you use for bills). Then you can use dice, cards, or small objects as the game piece. These are a very popular idea because they take up very little space, but you can do so much with them. For instance you can find holiday games, counting games, letter games, spelling, colors, shapes and much more. You can make some up yourself as well, and you can make some up with your child's favorite characters.

You can get great felt board stories and the templates as well as many file folder games by checking out our website Early Childhood Fun. We have done a lot of research all over the Internet to find great free resources for you to use for these purposes, so come check us out, and start printing off your templates and file folder games today! http://earlychildhoodfun.com/blog/