Then there is the 2 year old.

I love for Edward my 2 year old to be with us when we do school almost as much as he loves doing school with us. I know  that it would be a lot easier to just wait and do school while he is taking a nap (but I like for this time to be quiet time for everyone in the house) or while daddy is home so he can keep him out of the way. And don’t get me wrong there have been countless  days that we have had to put school on pause because Edward was not being very cooperative but most of the time he sits with us at least some of the time we are doing school so I always make sure that I have some things for him to do.  

 Gradually over the last few months I have been creating more and more activities that are fun but challenging to keep him busy while big sister and I are doing school.

Pom Poms

He does all kids of things with these fuzzy little balls. At first I was letting him play with some that are stuck to magnets along with some letter and number magnets on a dry erase board. Then I poked a hole in the top of the container that is holding all of his stuff and he would pick out the balls that would fit and poke them there the hole. After that I gave him some plastic tweezers that came out of some toy the kids had and he picks up the poms with the tweezers and put them in a cup. Theese simple fuzzy little balls bring countless minuts of quiet jabbering from him *lol every minut helps*.

Bingo marker

He loves that thing! He wants to dot everything,  so I always make sure and have plenty do a dot pages printed out with letters numbers or shapes. At first the marks were everywhere and slowly but surely they are more and more just getting on the circles.

Fish/fishing pole

For this I took one of the poms stuck to the magnet (bait) and using thin paper wraped wire (maybe for fake flower arrangements or something? I am not sure it is something I found in my moms craft supplies) and glued it to the end of a wooden dowel then I cut fish (at least he coud tell  they were fish) out of construction paper and used  a small paperclip for the mouth.

Matching puzzle
The latest thing that I have created for him is a color and shape matching game I started in my word processing program and created one page with  9 colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, brown, and white) in rectangles with the word written on it just so he can see the word not that he can read it.  And then another with 3 shapes (circle, square, and triangle) I printed out two copies of each on card stock and laminated them one copy I left whole (game board) and the other I cut out each color or shape (pieces). When we get ready to play he picks up a picece of the puzzle that I have cut out and I tell him what it is (some times he tells me) and then he finds where on the board the piece matches. I have noticed he can most of the time say witch shape is witch so soon I will have to add a few more shapes.

Oh and on a side note I think that I am going to make a game like this for Olivia except on the board just have the color word and on the pieces take the word off. I think that it would be a fun way to practice reading her color words.
I have been visiting a quite a few Montessori based websites and loving all of the fun ideas that they share for the tot to preschool aged kids to make learning fun. Most of it is simple using objects that most people already have around the house.

There are also toys that I know will keep him busy and quiet for a little while sometimes when he gets tired of sitting with us I will get out the blocks or the train set and he plays by himself for quite a while.

 

 

 This is a few things that I use to make school time a fun and enjoyable time for my entire family. I would love it if you could share some of your ideas on this subject in the comments below.

-Becca