Cereal Shapes
Dry cold cereal is a great tool for teaching kids about shapes. Fill a baggie with several types of cereal and let your toddler sort them out by shape.
Circles: Cheerios
Squares: Chex, Quaker Oat Squares
There are more shapes in some sugary cereals (Lucky Charms comes to mind). If you don’t want to buy an entire box, consider buying the little one-serving packs and letting your kids glue the shapes onto paper. Or just eating a small serving for a special treat.
And of course, there are other foods that come in basic shapes. Some crackers are triangle or rectangle shaped. When you start looking around your kitchen, you may find little teaching opportunities everywhere!
Little Dinosaurs
We’ve been checking out a different How Do Dinosaurs… book from the library for the past few weeks. The Boy really enjoys the rhythm and rhymes and has taken to reciting some parts. These are short picture books that teach a simple lesson. The dinosaurs learn their colors, count to ten, say good night, eat their food and go to school to name a few.
Younger kids might enjoy the counting and colors books and older kids will like to see the dinosaurs go to school and play with their friends. The silly, rhyming text is accompanied by great illustrations of dinosaurs with human parents. These are fantastic books for older kids who are into dinosaurs too.
Keep Track of Your Little One’s Books
We currently have anywhere from 500 to ∞ children’s books littering the house. There is the full 5′ bookshelf in the kid’s room, the 7′ one in the living room, the books on the coffee table and the ones that are stashed in the couch for leisure reading between building train tracks and knocking down Lego towers.
We have ratty books, brand new books, books that make sounds, books that have lights and require batteries, puzzle books that come apart, cloth books, velcro books, old classics, new soon-to-be classics and possibly even lost library books. But how to keep track of them all and be able to share that list with relatives and friends so you don’t end up with 6 copies of Pat the Bunny?
Enter the website, LibraryThing.com. You can create a free account and start entering all the books you have by title, author or ISBN. When you are done you get a fairly simple looking URL that you can send around to family and friends. This lists all the books and you can even see how many people also have a certain book on their list. Over 2000 for The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein!
You can even make other lists for yourself, but since you can fit about 20 children’s books in the space that Andrew Carnegie’s biography would fit, it is especially helpful for managing the ever growing kid’s bookshelf.
Old Return Address Labels
Although it may be tedious work to cut the picture off old return address labels, they can be put to good use as stickers for your child. Some relatives recently moved and gave The Boy all of their old return address labels to play with. We cut the name and address portion off and now have a good-sized bag of fun stickers for him.
Toddlerobics
We’ve recently discovered the Toddlerobics books and they have fast become favorites. One of our recent posts talked about ‘do-it-yourself’ toddler classes. If a gymnastics/activity class is not in the budget for you, check out these books for some toddlerobics at home. The Boy loves to do the activities in the book as I read them. Zita Newcome’s rhymes and illustrations appeal to children and adults alike. You can use these books to do a 20-30 minute gymnastics class at home!
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