How to Use Household Items to Teach

Transform resealable plastic bags and a variety of odds and ends into mess-free sensory bags for young children to explore the senses. Open the resealable bag and squeeze in a medium-size bottle of clear hair gel. Add several drops of food coloring until the gel reaches the color you'd like. Sprinkle in about 1/4-cup of glitter and seal the bag. Squish the mixture around in the bag to mix the ingredients together. Lay the bag on a flat surface and let your child practice pressing down on the bag to draw letters, numbers, shapes or doodles.

Use pots and pans, cardboard boxes and plastic containers to explore music with your child. He can bang on the pots and pans with a wooden spoon. You can wrap rubber bands around cardboard boxes and use them like a guitar. Fill plastic containers with dried beans or rice and use them like shakers. If young children will be using the plastic container maracas, seal the lids tightly onto the containers with tape.

Help your child learn about weighing by using a kitchen scale to weigh paper towel rolls, plastic containers, toys, crayons, books and any other safe item around the house. You can use a ruler to help her learn about linear measurement. Give your youngster the ruler and help her measure and compare the length of books, toys, pencils, blocks and plastic cups.

Bake and cook together to teach your child about measurements. Let her help you follow along the recipe and measure ingredients with measuring cups and spoons. She will also have an opportunity to see how ingredients mixed together create something completely different. Let your child smell and sample a variety of different ingredients -- such as vanilla extract, lemon rind and nutmeg.

Count everything with your child. Count with your child as you put away utensils, clean up toys and sort laundry. You can also use these items to help your child recognize similarities and differences between different types of utensils, organize toys according to size and divide up laundry according to color or type of clothing.

Fill up the sink with water and help your child learn a little science. Find a variety of items, such as feathers, toy boats, rocks and plastic bowls. Have your child predict whether the items will float or sink and then put them in the water to test the predictions.

Look through magazines together and cut out pictures of people with different facial expressions. Use the pictures to help your child recognize different emotions, which will help her to identify those emotions in herself and in others.

Set the laundry basket a few feet away and let your child toss laundry in the basket to develop motor skills and hand-eye coordination. Let her make her own judgments about whether she needs to move closer to or farther away from the basket to get the items in it and help her develop her problem-solving skills. You can use the same activity with soft or plush toys to make clean-up time more fun.

Use the analog clocks in your house to help your child learn about time. Start by explaining the hour, represented by the little hand. Watch the big hand move around the clock and explain that every turn around the clock equals one hour. Next, explain that every number on the clock signifies five minutes for the big hand. Practice telling time whenever you̵7;re in the room with an analog clock.