Educational Activities for Toddlers

Hi everyone! Welcome to Teeny Tot Tuesday, where the Teeny Tot has officially started doing some of my Letter of the Week activities! She is on the Letter B this week, and so she did a mix of B is for Butterfly and B is for Ballerina activities.

 

Here she is working on her lacing skills. This takes some patience, repetition, and time. She likes to skip over holes, so I remind her to get each one. I like to teach them to go up from the bottom in every hole to start out with, then later we can move on to some more fancy stitching options.

 

The Teeny Tot loves puzzles, these 6 piece puzzles are a great beginning set for tiny tots. Its great for logical thinking skills and since the puzzles only have 6 pieces, the children tend to be able to figure them out on their own after a few tries.

I’ve had a few questions on how old I recommend starting Letter of the Week activities, and the answer depends. I tend to start these around age 3.5, but it really depends on the interest level of your child as well as their maturity level. I see no problem in letting younger kiddos play these games, just realize that they probably won’t quite understand what they are doing for the majority of them. The Teeny Tot has been doing some of them on and off for about a year, but nothing official. She recently started showing interest, so we pulled them out to see how it would go.

She’s taken to the activities quite well, and she typically prefers if Strawberry Shortcake helps her out. They’ve been sitting together and Strawberry Shortcake will pull out an activity for her, then turn and do some of her own work. I will allow this as long as it’s not hindering Strawberry’s work load. Then I take over the instruction so she can concentrate on her work.

All that said, if you’re not doing a bunch of activities with your 3 year old yet, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t feel bad! Strawberry Shortcake never did any of this! She was my oldest, and I wasn’t ready to start school yet with her, and you know what? She’s doing just fine! I mainly have her doing all of these activities because 1) The Teeny Tot WANTS to do them, and 2) she has older siblings that do work, and she really just wants to be included by having her own school to do. If your oldest is 3 and not interested in formal activities yet, don’t sweat it! Just wait and try again later. Another option for younger toddlers is to try some of Carisa’s Tot Tray ideas, I find those work really well with 2-3 year olds. If you want to see what the Teeny Tot has done in the past click here.

 

Here is her letter B magnet page. I have this cute little blue cookie tray that came from a phonics set we found at a used fair. The magnets she’s using are Power Magnets I purchased online at Amazon. Please be careful with these, they’re definitely choking hazards!

 

She did a great job matching the letters in letter disk match up.

 

I’m sure that I’ve told you the Do-A-Dot markers are the Teeny Tot’s favorite things. She took it upon herself to try and make a butterfly using them.

 

Next up we did the large floor numbers. I only did numbers 1-5 right now, and later we’ll move up to 10. I also have her count our calendar everyday which she loves. The repetition and seeing each number as she says it really helps with number recognition and counting skills!

 

The Teeny tot loves to color, and I’ve been pleased to see that she naturally holds the pencil correctly.

 

 

Here is her finished work. Strawberry Shortcake took this picture, she’s dead set on taking over my blog when she grows up!

 

Here we are doing the “Poke Page”. I probably should think of another name for this, feel free to leave suggestions below LOL! We used oversized pushpins as our poking device, and as you can see we do it on the carpet so as not to damage the table. The goal is to use your poking device to poke holes along the letter outline. It’s great for fine-motor skills. Afterwards we hung it up on our window so she could see her letters with the light shining through them. Next she taped the sheet to her bedroom wall, noting what a good job she did.

 

Strawberry Shortcake helped the Teeny Tot sort her capital Bs from the lowercase b cards.

 

Next she did the small, medium, and large size sorting game. The Teeny Tot was a natural at this game and quickly insisted that she didn’t need any help.

 

Strawberry Shortcake also helped her do the pattern activity. She didn’t quite get it, but Strawberry was patient to show her the patterns over and over.

 

Finally we did some counting games. Again I pulled out number cards with 1-5 on them only. I told her to put the same amount of magnets on the card based on the number on it. She asked me to help her with the numbers, but then counted the magnets herself.

 

And that was it for our Letter B activities this week. All of the activities are available for download via the links below:

• Letter of the Week (Whole Alphabet curriculum download)
• B is for Butterfly (Individual letter downloads)
• B is for Ballerina  (Individual letter downloads)