Welcome to Teeny Tot Tuesday where you get to see how I attempt to keep my toddler busy and engaged during school time. Our Teeny Tot is 3 years old now and she’s quite the busy bee. She likes to participate in school, and is pretty good about working through her own activities, but sometimes she goes and gets other things to play with and that’s fine with me.
Our school “stuff” is pretty open to her. I don’t really limit the use of our school games. I figure if people are having fun learning, who cares if it’s during official “school hours” or not?
We’re trying to work on counting these days. One of the kits I’ve had around for years is the Lakeshore Learning See & Solve Manipulative Kit. I just grabbed numbers 1-5 (the kit comes with 0-9) and then enough disks to let her put the correct amount by each number. After she was done counting, she just played with the disks adding and taking them off the pegs.
I also let her work with our colorful dice in dice and the Clear the board game from my Dice & Domino Math Fun Kit. I placed all our dice in a box with a hole in the top. She grabbed one out without looking and then was allowed to remove a matching Unifix cube from the chart. She repeated the actions until the chart was all cleared.
The Teeny Tot went and grabbed her Parents Bristle Blocks and started building a little thingy-ma-bob. I don’t recall now what she said it was. It’s all good though the Bristle blocks are great for little ones because they stick together well and are fairly easy to assemble together.
Later she took out our Jumbo Dice in Dice and started stacking. She actually got them all piled up before knocking them down for fun.
Since she totally loves our Jumbo Dice in Dice , I let her play with our Preschool Probability sheet. She rolled one and we counted the dots together, then she colored in one cube for whatever number we counted. Repeat.
Since she was nicely occupied by all of the fun with the dice and unifix cubes, I turned my attention to the older kiddos. About 3 seconds later I looked back and saw this…We used it as an opportunity to match all of the colors back up.
One of her favorite games is the Educational Insights Hot Dots Jr. She loves hearing Ace the talking dog tell her if she’s doing a good job or not!
We’re also working on her tracing skills to get her fine-motor skills going for preschool. Before having her trace using a pencil, I started her off getting the idea using stickers to trace numbers. Once she got bored with that, I let her use our Mini-Stampers from Lakeshore Learning. They’re in the shape of a fat marker, but the tips have a shape on them like a stamp.
Next I pulled out our Letter A for Apple tracing sheet and let her have at it with a dry-erase marker. She was essentially coloring along the lines, but doing a great job! Now that I know she can do that…bwaahahaa look out Teeny Tot! Here comes mama with some Letter of the Week stuff for you girl! ;o)
Here are some of the items the Teeny Tot found in her boxes:
1. Lakeshore See & Solve Manipulative Kit
2. Alphabet Alley Jonah Memory Game
3. Biggie Beads
4. A is for Apple letter tracing
5. A is for Apple magnet page with do-a-dot markers
6. Guidecraft Nesting Sort & Stack Cubes
7. Pattern Block Cards and Blocks
8. Educational Insights Hot Dots Jr.
Have some fun Tot School ideas to share? Make sure to link up below to share!
You must do a lot of laundry – notice she’s wearing three different outfits 🙂
Different hairdos and hair bows, photos must have been taken on different days. 🙂
I notice on the wall behind her what looks like individual/separated states. Would you mind telling us where you got them? The big map can be a little overwhelming sometimes. It would be nice to work with a state by itself every now and then.
We played with those same bristle blocks this week to make “aliens” for outer space week. Truely love your site and LOVE your printables! We are using your Letter of the week printables for my preschooler and my tot loves to color on them too! Thanks for all you do!
Dear Erica, Thank you for letting us all take a glimpse into your homeschooling life. It is always helpful to see how others are doing things. This is our second year of homeschooling and my littlest (of four girls) is just 2. But, I am already making plans for how to keep her occupied and learning during our schooling time. Right now it is just a lot of games and reading books, but she will need more come fall. I have already purchased your letter of the week curriculum and we will see if she is ready for that in the fall. Between now and then I just need to print and laminate everything…and you know there is a lot! Anyway, thanks for sharing and inspiring me.
Have a great day. Heather
those bristle blocks are great for the littles. We gave our 2 year old some for Christmas and they REALLY keep her busy. She is dying to be able to do “cool cool” as she calls school.
Hi!
TT’s boxes look like so much fun! How much work have you done on pencil grip with her? Did she just naturally hold it correctly?
After I read your post today I was inspired to print out some of your domino/dice math sheets for my 4 year old to do. However, I didn’t want her using regular dice since we have a 1 year old who sticks everything in her mouth. I decided to go to our Hobby Lobby and see if I could find some wood blocks that were too big to fit in the little honey’s mouth. I did find some 1 1/4″ blocks (with the 40% off coupon they came to $1.90 for 8!), came home and wrote with pencil where all the dots would go to make dice, and (apprehensively!) handed 6 different colored permanent markers to my daughter and had her color them in. She did a great job and now we have 8 jumbo dice that we made ourselves for very little cost! Thanks for the inspiration!
I wish I had these products! Having something for my 2 1/2 year old to do would make schooling my 6 year old a lot easier. We may have to invest in some.
This is so wonderful!!! I am so glad I discovered this blog. We will be homeschooling our son because the school system here in CA is sorely lacking, especially for people with learning differences like our son (he was just diagnosed with Verbal Apraxia and he is in the process of being evaluated for Autism Spectrum).
I’ve been looking for stuff to get him started with school stuff, because he is easily bored with typical toys and TV. But most people’s suggestions seem to work better for verbal kids. But I can do almost all these with him, especially the coloring stuff. He’ll color and draw for hours if I let him 🙂 Thank you!
Oops, I forgot to say, my son is about 2 and a half 🙂