Even as adults, we often find sharing our favorite dress with our siblings or letting our colleagues have a bite from the sandwich we brought for lunch difficult, right? You can easily imagine how tough it is for preschoolers. But, as parents and teachers, we must teach the children to learn to share. They might seem reluctant to let their friends play with their toys, share the food their mother prepared with others, etc.
During classroom sessions, you can give small lectures on how sharing is necessary, the significance of ‘sharing is caring,’ etc. At home, parents can sit with them and let them decide which toys are okay to share and which are not, for those are special. But the impact will be higher if they are made part of engaging activities based on the theme of ‘sharing is caring.’
If you are wondering which activities would serve the purpose, here is a list. You may use them in your classroom, and instill the philosophy of sharing is caring in your little learners’ minds.
Sharing and caring activities to try with little learners
At this age, preschoolers learn which things belong to them and which are of others. It isn’t easy to make them share. Sharing, being a crucial social skill, forcing them to do the same is not wise, as that would not engage them fully in the process. So, activities can come to your rescue where they participate and unknowingly learn how sharing helps accomplish certain things.
1. Color a beach ball
This activity is about drawing and coloring together while sharing the resources available.
Things you need:
- Crayons
- A picture of a beach ball (with three colors)
- Sheets of paper with big beach balls drawn on them (not colored)
How to conduct this activity:
- Form teams of children with six members in each group.
- Give them a box of crayons with three colors only.
- Hand out the beach ball drawing among the students (one drawing to one team).
- Hang the big colorful picture in the class where they can see it.
- Now ask each group of six to color the ball as shown in the picture.
As there are more members and fewer crayons, they will have to share crayons to complete coloring the picture. This way, you can tell them that as they shared crayons among them, they could come up with such nicely colored beach balls. Or else it would not be possible. This would enable the children to see the importance.
2. Share the pencil
For this activity, you will need a little bit of prior preparation. Send a note to half of the children’s parents to provide them with a blue color pencil. For the parents of the rest of the children, send a note telling them to give them a green color pencil. Also, ensure that they bring those pencils to the next class.
Things you need:
Photocopies of a small passage from the children’s books
How to conduct this activity:
- Give a copy of the small passage to every child in the class.
- Ask them to find two words from the passage as many times as they appear. For example, ask them to find the words ‘bear’ and ‘tree’ from the passage. If the word bear appears four times in the passage, they must mark all four. Similarly, if ‘tree’ is there two times, ask them to mark both.
- Instruct the students to use blue colored pencils for one word and green colored pencils for another. For example, you can ask them to mark ‘bear’ in blue and ‘tree’ in green.
- Ask them to finish finding the words within ten minutes.
As you have already asked the parents to send one colored pencil, some students will not have green pencils, and some will not have blue pencils. So, when you give them the task of using both colors, they have to turn to their classmates and ask for it. Each student will need the other’s pencil to finish the task. In the end, you can tell them how sharing the pencils helped them complete the activity.
3. Share the song
In this activity, you involve the learners in singing a complete song by sharing the lyrics. You can consult with the music teacher about which songs they have learned. Or, you can choose some common nursery rhyme songs like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Mary Had a Little Lamb, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, etc.
Things you need:
- Paper
- Pen
How to conduct this activity:
- Write the song in parts. For example, write only the first two lines of We Wish You a Merry Christmas on a piece of paper. Write the following two lines on another paper, and so on.
- Now, distribute these parts of songs among the students in the class.
- You need to take note of which students received which song.
- Ask one student to come forward and sing the full song, a part of which they have received.
- But as nobody has the whole song with them, you will ask them to share the lyrics so that everybody can have it.
Through this activity, you can teach the children how they can perform only through sharing the lyrics. You make them share the lyrics so that everyone can follow your instruction and sing the entire song. Thus, you send a message that you need to share to achieve a successful performance. In other words, sharing is caring.
4. Redecorate the dollhouse
In this activity, involve all the children so that sharing is not confined to only peers or groups of children.
Things you need:
A dollhouse
How to conduct this activity:
- Tell the class that you have a dollhouse from your childhood and will bring it one day to show everyone.
- The day before you do this activity, tell the students that they probably won’t like the dollhouse, for there is nothing in it. You have lost everything such as chairs, tables, the bed, etc. Only the house remains.
- Then ask them if they could help restore the dollhouse by sharing their toys with you. Also, mention that it will cheer you up immensely if they do so.
- The next day, bring the dollhouse to the class and ask the children to decorate the interiors as they wish with the toys they brought.
- When they are done, clap happily and exclaim how amazed and happy you are that they restored your childhood dollhouse.
This activity involves the direct and active engagement of all the children. This activity will also help them practice and develop spatial intelligence as they place different things in different places in the dollhouse. They do not feel they are learning something. Instead, they think they are trying to cheer you up. While doing so, you make them share their toys with you. Your happy expression makes them feel that they have done something good. So when you refer to this activity in the next class and tell them how they all cared for you by sharing, they can relate effectively.
5. Share your food
Like toys, food is something that preschoolers are most reluctant to share with others. So, you have to think of an activity that will entertain them and, at the same time, teach them about sharing.
Things you need:
- M&M candies
- A puppet (preferably a bird or any other animal and with multiple colors)
How to conduct the activity:
- Separate any one color of M&M candies and keep it with you. For example, you can remove all the red candies and keep them in a container.
- Distribute the rest of the M&M candies among the kids in your class.
- No child will have red candies with them.
- Now put on the puppet and tell the class that it has all the red candies. They will only have red candies from the puppet if they share a candy of another color.
- Keep the container of the red candies and an empty bowl on the table.
- Now tell the class that you know how red candies are a favorite of many. Encourage them to take one red candy from the hungry puppet and give him another in the empty bowl.
- Every time a child does so, make the puppet exclaim with joy or say a few words like “that’s wonderful Emily,” or “Ooh, a blue candy! I love it!” etc.
- When every child has shared the M&M’s, the activity will end with the puppet thanking everyone.
This activity will involve the children in sharing something they love most-candies. They realize that by sharing the candies, they also get the scope to have another candy of their choice. By sharing, they also feed the hungry puppet, and as it thanks everyone, the children feel that they are doing something good. So, they learn that sharing is caring.
Wrapping up,
It is best to place them in situations and involve them in activities while teaching preschoolers about various real-life things. A simple action like sharing can sometimes be loathsome for children. Especially when it comes to toys, pencils, and food, children are reluctant to share with others. Reading about the importance of sharing in books or listening to teachers and parents lecturing about it may not always convince them. Activities such as those we mentioned above can impact the understanding deeply. Once children learn to share, they tend to become better human beings in the future.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,