A few friends have recently asked me about types of activities to do with their two-year-olds at home.
I depend heavily on my teaching background to come up with ideas but I also use Pinterest to get ideas. Remember, I am using this homeschooling blog to help me plan for lessons for my three-year-old.
There are so many different ways to teach children. I enjoyed taking my two-year-old to a Parent-Tot program at the local preschool. It was time together, time to grow socially with children the same age. The activities during that particular program were based around hands-on music and art activities. At home, I try to hit these main areas when planning activities/lessons: Gross Motor, Fine Motor, Music, Movement, Cooking, Literacy, Math, Pretend Play, Crafts/Art and Sensory Play.
You can follow me on Pinterest and find boards dedicated to some of these different developmental areas:
I follow a few really great boards:
I haven’t found any boards to follow yet for Music & Movement but we love watching music clips on YouTube. I guess I should start pinning them myself!
A great idea to keep yourself organized at home with your activities is to print off these cute, free calendars. Pick one activity a day to do and write it out. I did this last year when my oldest was two!
To find out some of my favorite teacher bloggers that I follow, check out this link.
I think I could write a really great blog post with my specific lesson plans but I am so tired from a long weekend of Halloween parties, family and friend time. I am barely keeping my eyes open so for now I will share a few activities I would suggest doing at home with your two year old (off the top of my head). Every child is different and may be at different stages of development. Literacy development starts with learning the abcs. Here are some more beginning basics.
First, you want to teach your child to say their abcs.
Then, teach them to be able to recognize BOTH upper and lowercase letters.
Finally, children should be able to come up with a sound for each letter. After this, and daily reading, could come reading readiness. More to come on that another time!
The above can happen anytime from ages 2-4. In Michigan, by age 5 (typical age children enter kindergarten) they should be able to do the skills above along with many others to meet the state benchmarks.
- ABC Bingo
- Attend free story time at your local library
- Check out books WITH your child every week
- Read books TO your child every day
- Match upper and lowercase letters (great printables can be found on Pinterest)
- Buy and eat letter snacks (snacks in the shapes of letters)
- Talk about LETTERS in the Environment–Look, we are going into Target, It has the letter T at the beginning of it!
- Match upper and lower case letters with magnetic letters
- Make letter shaped pancakes
- Limit the amount of screen time your child has (this includes tv, computers, iphones, tpads, etc.)
- Great apps for strengthening these skills: Letter Quiz, Preschool MM, Super Why!, Curious George Dictionary, PBS Kids, Letter School
Check out an interview over at Growing Book by Book.