Fun Packs! Premade Educational Kits - Planning and Product Development

For a long time, I wanted to created a done-for-you activity pack for homeschool moms or just those wanting to do a bit of learning at home. When the idea first came to me in 2014, I started out putting together kits for my sister-in-law who had two young boys and a set of infant twins. In an effort to help provide some activities for the older kiddos to occupy their time and distract them, I created a number of activity kits for them. These kits went along with a number of printable packs I had created - some with them in mind. Inspired by busy bag swaps I had participated in with other moms of young children at the time, I also included a number of additional busy bag type activities inspired by the packs.

The first pack I created was a Back to School kit using my Back to School Printable Pack. This pack is a fantastic starter pack as it begins with basic concepts for preK and kindergarten. For the kit to send to my nephews, I printed several of the individual pages as worksheets. I also put together some of the manipulative activities from the printable pack like the number puzzle and the bottle cap letter activity. I used recycled bottle caps to make the letters for the hands-on matching activity. I included 4 busy bag activities two printed from the printable pack - matching and memory cards and color sort cards. I also made two unique busy bags - a ribbon snake with school themed foam shapes and a pom pom sorting activity using an egg carton and a clothes pin. I wanted to create a variety of activities, especially providing quiet games that could be played on the go or when their mama needed some extra time for the babies. The busy bags were placed in zip-top bags to make them easy to carry along in a diaper bag or purse.

The first Fun Pack was Back to School themed.

The Football Pack is one of my few unpublished packs.

Over the next several months I continued to create printable packs and compile Fun Packs for my nephews. All the packs included worksheets, manipulative activities, and four busy bag activities. While most of the busy bags were repeatable activities, some were in the form of craft projects like beading crafts or picture building with adhesive foam shapes. I created packs that matched my Football Pack, Halloween Monsters Bundle, Turkey Pack, Gingerbread Treats Pack, Nativity Pack, and Snowman Pack. My own kiddos also worked on these activities and vetted them for their cousins.

As I was putting these kits together for my nephews I was working to figure out how to replicate these packs for other moms. I wanted to create something that had value and included repeatable activities. I wanted to coordinate these kits with my printable packs. I wanted to create activities that were pre-printed and put together so that moms could benefit from these packs if they didn't have access to a printer or other small manipulative items - not everyone has dice or bingo markers laying around. I wanted to create activities that maybe weren't part of the printable pack but could incorporate additional learning concepts as a bonus on top of what is available with just the pack. This would create something new and different even if a parent or teacher already had the coordinating printable pack. Additionally, I could laminate some of the printed components to make them sturdier for multiple uses. Busy bag activities needed to be stored in zip-top bags so they could be easily carried for quiet time activities away from the home.

For my nephews, I was able to go a bit over the top and incorporate other craft supplies and activities I found, but that may be difficult when it came to putting these kits together on a larger scale. I also upcycled some random things I had saved for arts and craft projects like empty egg cartons and salvaged bottle caps - this would not be feasible for kits going to other families. I needed to have some consistency, a template or plan for the Fun Packs so there is uniformity. It also makes it easier to establish "What all is in a Fun Pack?" I decided to create a standard sized Fun Pack and a Fun Pack Junior to offer different sized kits so moms could decide what was best for them. I created a "recipe" of sorts.

The Monsters Bundle available on TpT includes
an extra pack of printable activities.

I was able to get creative with foam shapes and
other craft supplies due to the popularity of 
gingerbread men around Christmas time.

I established that the standard Fun Pack would include 20 worksheet pages which I would compile into a mini workbook, 2 hands-on activities, and 4 busy bags. For the Fun Pack Junior, I would include a 20 page mini workbook, 1 hands-on activity, and 2 busy bags. Each of the packs would be all-inclusive so no additional supplies were needed aside from basic supplies that most people have like writing implements and crayons. The kits would include instructions for each activity so parents or teachers know how the kit could be used. The boxes for each kit would be labeled and of a standard size to make storage easy.

Once I established what would be included in the kit and had plans for packaging, I needed to set it into motion and decide the best options for each item. In 2016, I created a Fun Pack as a birthday present for a friend's son to put it all together and see how it might work out as a finished kit. The workbook I created was spiral bound, but I found it would be easier and more cost effective to create a more traditional stapled binding for the mini workbook. The original workbook was full color and had more pages than ended up putting in the final workbooks. I was better able to refine the specifics I wanted for final packaging with this kit. It had coloring pages, a hands-on activity - grid games - and four busy bags that included activities like clip cards, patterning practice, 3-part cards, and memory cards. I included instructions and insert cards for the busy bags. 

After four years of planning, I created my first marketable and complete pack. I needed to go full-out and establish exactly how these kits would come together and be presented to parents or teachers that may be interested in using them. This Fun Pack was a Fun Pack Junior, another pack created as a gift, so technically, it was a final practice run. This time, the kit was for another nephew. This Fun Pack was based on my Dice Printable Pack since my nephew was really into dice at the time, I created the pack with him in mind. The Fun Pack Junior was fully created complete with all the packaging information and instructions that would be in a final edition of a pack. It included a mini full color workbook with 20 pages of activities. The hands-on activity in this pack was a roll and cover activity. Two half pages were printed and laminated for durability. Two dice and multi-color bingo markers were included to complete the activity. Two busy bags were included in the pack packaged in zip-topped bags for travel and storage. One busy bag activity was a set of matching and memory cards which are part of the Dice Printable Pack. They were printed on cardstock and laminated. The other busy bag was number clip cards. Again, these cards were printed on cardstock and laminated. Clothes pins were included to complete the activity.

All the activities included in this pack are part
of the Dice Printable Pack.

The feedback that I got on all the previous kits I had put together was positive. I was ready to move forward with more packs. In a future post I'll go through the themes selected and what is included in the final packs I've compiled. As of now, I have completed four Fun Packs - two standard sized kits and two Fun Pack Juniors. They've been well received and I'm excited about the development of additional Fun Packs in the future, many of which are already in the works.

So, what kind of themes would interest you? I'd love to get some feedback on activities that appear interesting and other suggestions for the packs.

3-Part Cards, Prep and In Action

Ah, 3-part cards... These are one of my favorite things (in addition to what I call 3-piece cards - you know, I avoid confusion since an alternate word starting with "p" makes all the difference). The thing about them is that if you've never worked with them, seeing the pages among the others in my printable packs may be confusing, so here's a bit of a how-to and why I love them.

So, what are these things? Well, 3-part cards are actually inspired by Montessori style teaching. Actual Montessori 3-part cards are typically a bit more complex, preferring photographs over illustrated images and mounting the cards on color coordinated paper according to subject matter. Even without these aspects, they are still a great teaching tool. 3-part cards are intended to facilitate word recognition, a sort of extension to sight words or, they may be made with sight words. The idea is to match the words with their associated image and help youngsters learn the word by sight, also called whole word recognition. It is an early reading skill for children. This is done in a gradual process by starting with a combination card of both the picture and word and matching it to the individual pictures and words. With repetition and practice, kiddos will eventually learn what each word looks like and will no longer need the combination card to match the images to the words.

So, once you know what they are and how they are used, preparation seems much less daunting. For this guide, I'm using my Snowflake 3-Part Color Cards which were the Facebook Fan Freebie for January. These cards help with learning the basic color words. First print your cards, preferably on card stock. You'll notice that one page has a black line separating the image from the word, this is the card you will cut in two along the line. The other card without the line stays as is; you just cut around it.

Once all your cards are cut out, you can see how they work better for matching and recognition. With true Montessori 3-part cards, the background is plain and the cards are mounted on a colored background for categorization. I tend to put a decorative background on them to coordinate with a pack, but, you can certainly still mount them on colored card stock or construction paper if you choose. After mounting the cards, or simply cutting them out, you may choose to laminate them if you expect them to get a decent amount of use.


Your child can then get to work matching the cards. I just spread them all over the floor and let my kids have at it. We don't go in any pattern, but you can put all the combination word/image cards in a row and separate the word cards and image cards in their own groups or rows. You can work on alphabetizing them, etc. Basically, anything you can think of, go for it. The idea is, after working on these over time, your child will learn to identify the word that goes with each picture without using the combination card.

I also have my child work on spelling and letter recognition as he says each letter in the word.

This set focuses on the colors and their names. I have done other similar 3-part color cards with various themes to coordinate with several of the packs I have done. This adds a bit of a change, but also allows your child to make the associations with other things. I created a set with colored gingerbread men for one of my Christmas packs. Shown here, I have a set that goes with my Back to School pack. In addition to different themes (snowflakes, gingerbread men, crayons, etc.), you may also notice that I've used different fonts for different sets. While I often like using a basic font with standard version of the letters, I also like to mix it up a little to help kiddos recognize the letters when they are written a bit differently. With several letters like 'a' and 'g' having alternate styles, it helps with letter recognition if little ones see them in action.

Colors certainly aren't the only use for these cards as you have probably guessed. They can be used for any number of things. While colors are one of my favorite uses for these cards, I also have made multiple number sets to help my kids start recognizing their number words. Here is the set included in one part of my Sailboat Pack.

One last thing: storage. I keep my 3-part cards in individual baggies. They get stored with many of the other printable manipulative activities we've done. It's not the most organized system, and I hope to improve upon it, but it works for now.

Thanks so much for checking out how to use these cards and a peek at how they work in action! Please let me know if you have any questions!