Soft blocks. Montessori name recognition.

Our toddler began to learn letters in the nursery. I like the way nursery make this and I thought that it would be great if our toddler would recognize his name spelling. He perfectly distinguish letter A and letter E, maybe some more, but I haven't identified this yet. Many times, I have written his name on paper or on dashboard and he enjoyed this. Every person loves to hear and to see his name.

I thought, it would be great to make a play with letters, and create something interactive for my toddler. Soft blocks - great way to develop fine motor abilities such as touching and playing with them. Apart of this, I made these soft blocks colorful and he can learn colors. I made them in such a way, that he can match letters, once blocks are arranged correctly, he can spell his name, DAMIAN. This montessori activity develops his creativity and makes him easy to learn new letters. And of course his name.

How do you like the idea?

Read more ...

Toddler activities - Part III. A lot of fun and learning.

Always I try to prepare some interesting activities for my toddler, but not always I have too much time to do that. So, I leave Damian to play with his toys or watch videos on youtube, TV is not on our to do list, so he recuperates this time with videos from youtube. As well, it is very interesting that he finds activities from the things that I did´t thought he would like to do. In this article I want to share with you some of unplanned activities.

Insert straws into an egg support:

Filling up the bottle with tissues:

Puzzle:

Playing with oranges as being balls:

Read more ...

Colored beans, one of the inside activities that help develop the feelings and learn colors

One of montessori activities that I tryed to do after looking for some activities on pinterest, was colouring the beans. On pinteres I found coloured rice, coloured pasta but not beans. I decided to try beans as not to repeat others. As advised on other blogs, I have used special food color, as it is better if your toddler try all the things in his mouth. It is a perfect way to entertain a toddler, but it wasn´t the easiest task to do, as colouring the beans took time, these weren´t coloured as I thought, and it took a lot of time to get dried. Finnaly these were dried, and Damian could enjoy to play with them, and not just to sort them but as well to fulfill the bottle with red beans and yellow beans. Interesting experience for my toddler, but as well too much work and too many time to prepare this activity.

Below some images:

Read more ...

Toddler activities - Part II

This weekend we didn´t go out of Barcelona, we stayed at home, our lovely flat became a fortune for a lot of funny things with Damian (on Sunday evening we´ve spent a lot of time to put all in order when Damian went to sleep :D). I browse on internet what we can do and how we can play with our child and not to get bored. I want to say that I have never expected that I will have so much fun, playing with him. Try with your kid and you´ll see :).

- fine motor activities

 duck craft - I´ve seen on internet chicken craft here, but I decided to try it with a duck, as Damian loves so much ducks and when he sees a duck he begin to say ¨quack quack¨ :). For this craft you will need, paper, some feathers and glue. Look what we have got:

shape matching - is another activity, here we didn´t make too much effort, as he has a really great toy that helps him to be entertaining. But, if you don´t have such great toy, it is very easy to do it, you will need cardboard, and you can paint the forms, then cut from colored paper the shapes, and leave your child to put cut paper on the shapes painted on the cardboard.

fill the bottle- amazing activity, if you want your toddler to be amused and doesn´t require too much your attention. The idea is to have an empty plastic bottle, rice (you can choose whatever you want), space. Show your child how he needs to fulfil this bottle and that´s it.

make pyramids from cubes

- Montessori activities (1-10 numbers)

 I found this activity a little bit difficult to do with Damian, I think that he is not so big enough for it. I will try again several times to see if it was his first time, or he is too little for this activity.

I used TP tubes for matching the numbers and straws to count the numbers, I find this activity interesting, but maybe it is too early.

 and last but not least activity, you can do it even with babies or your kids is reading or books, babies just love them.

Have a great week.

Read more ...