TODDLER LEARNING ACTIVITIES! Keep Your Toddler Busy At Home With These Educational Games: Ages 2-3

Today is all about working those fine motor skills, color recognition, sorting, and matching. Hey guys, thanks for checking out this video. My name is Vashti from Weights at Home and I'm a mom of three littles, ages four, three, and one years old. Today, I want to carry on with my activity bag series. If you haven't seen my last videos on this, I will leave a link in the Those activities were geared for ages three and four year olds. Today, I want to share with you activities for two and three year olds. So with all that being said, grab a pen and a paper and let's jump right in. This is an object to picture matching game. The purpose of this game is to lay out the cards and place the miniature fish on the matching picture. Here, I used these miniature sea creatures that I got off of Amazon and then I just took pictures of them and made these cards using Canva. Canva is great because it can take out the background that your objects were sitting on and then that just makes the picture brighter when printing out. Though, I do think that this option is in the Canva Pro version, so I believe you would have to pay for that upgrade. Also, if I spent more time on these, I would have measured out the pictures to fit the sea creatures perfectly when placing them on. Some worked and some just didn't. Just glad that kids don't really care about things looking perfect and we're still able to understand where each of them goes. Another way I have used these is putting the card into this wooden card holder and then they have to concentrate on finding the object that matches the picture. The purpose of object to picture matching is that it helps the child develop a sense of abstract thinking, which is a skill that is essential for reading. This activity can also be extended into pretend play for your child, so however you decide to use these, it makes for a great busy bag as it's small and easy to carry around. So here we have a color sorting activity. Depending on how old your child is, at first they can experiment with containment, putting the colored popsicle sticks into the felt pockets and pulling them out. Eventually, they will learn to match the color of the stick with the color of the pocket. This is really great for working those fine motor skills and color recognition. It's also very simple to make these. I just used some felt sheets that I got at the dollar store and I'll leave a link of a video I made in the description box below explaining how I put these together with a hot glue gun. When using the popsicle sticks to place into the pocket, your child is working on their hand-eye coordination, grip strength, finger dexterity, and bilateral coordination as they use both hands to fit the popsicles into the pocket. So here we have foam sheets that I found at the dollar store and I just cut them into strips, then placed velcro at the end of the strips to be used as a chain link activity. I like how the foam is tougher than construction paper so it's pretty durable and doesn't easily rip. That way my daughter can just keep playing with them over and over again without breaking them. This is a great fine motor activity and is actually quite challenging at first because you have to twist the strip in such a way to link it to the other piece and use their problem-solving skills to pull a new strip into the already connected link and try and attach it. Using both hands together requires bilateral hand coordination and it is a necessity for cutting with scissors, buttoning a coat, and writing on paper. When linking the paper is great for hand-eye coordination, dexterity, and works the small muscles of their hands. Just another fun way to work on those pre-writing skills. My daughter has opted for making bracelets with these as well so lots of options can be had with this one. If your kids are anything like mine and love opening and closing different kinds of containers or boxes, they will love this one as well. My kids can't get enough of the activities that involve opening and closing different lids so this is a great way to incorporate those type of activities into their play while working on their color recognition. This is just another dollar store find as well and we've had it since my oldest was a baby and it's been trickling down through all three of my kiddos as a number one favorite. I just placed these stickers on top of the lids to help them sort and organize and then use these pom-poms to fill up each of the slots. It also works as a great counting game as well. You can model how to count or encourage your child to count each of the pom-poms as it goes in. Here is another favorite and similar activity to the last, just this time I'm using a different set of pill holders and using these color cubes to work as the manipulatives for this activity. Pretty straightforward as all they are doing is sorting and matching the wood cubes into the colored pill holders. I've also used buttons before on this one but found the wood cubes to work better for us. Activities like this enhances their hand-eye coordination as they fit the cube into the little space provided as well as find motor control as they steady their hands. So I got these way back when my printer was broken. They are free paint swatches from the store. I like that they have different shades of the same color. This is really great for their cognitive development as it helps to develop your child's concentration, memory, and visual discrimination. All I did was laminate and cut out those swatches and then used velcro to allow the matches to stick together and stay in one spot. I had made these for traveling so it was great to have the velcro keep everything in place. Just another awesome way for your toddler to work on their color recognition skills and get familiar with the idea that all colors have different shades and don't always look the same. And then with the leftover paint swatches, I turned them into another color match type game. You can obviously use whatever kind of paper you have. I incorporated clothes pins as an added challenge to work those fine motor skills. So basically all they are doing is sorting and matching by shape and then sorting and matching by color. Then using the clothes pins to steady their hand and hold the matches together. So this idea is a personal one that you can incorporate into your child's learning. I have family way back home in a different province so it's really important to me that my kids know who their cousins and aunts and uncles are. I started out by just naming each of my family members to my kids and pointing to the picture on the card and then encouraging them to repeat the name, which can be really helpful for their language development too. And then I made a second set so they can use it for a matching game as well. I definitely have to update this one. My family back home has grown a lot so that is definitely on the to-do list. So for the longest time, my kids never had the patience for this one, especially my oldest. Maybe it's a boy thing, just not his thing at all. But I saw these threading activities everywhere and reading how great it is for their fine motor skills starting at like 18 months. Yeah, that definitely wasn't happening in my house. But I always just kept it out and available because it's super easy to put together and these beads here that I got at the dollar store come in like a huge bucket, so hard to pass that up. But just recently when my daughter turned three, it was like a switch went off and she actually started gravitating to this one a lot. In the last month, this has now become her favorite and one she gravitates towards the most. I did have to switch out the string for some pipe cleaners instead, so this seems to be working best for us. I think because with the pipe cleaners, the beads stay on better. Then if she wants, she can color coordinate the beads to the color pipe cleaner and have fun doing that. Another quick and easy one to put together, just using some stickers, pad of paper, and some markers. My daughter is really into crafting and art, so I made this one with her in mind especially. You can get a ton of these puffy stickers at the dollar store. I liked the puffed ones the best because it's easier for your toddler to peel them off without assistance, and then I just continually put new ones in there. I like to keep just one or two pads of stickers in a bag at a time because if you know, you know. Kids will make a huge mess with these things. Trial and error. Learn my lesson. The less availability of stickers, the better. Then this drawing board was gifted to us from family, and my kids have really loved this. They got it off of Amazon, and it's a mess-free way for your kids to be creative. It's small enough to fit into these bags, so it's been a great way to store and have a spot for it. Just easy to put in here and take out. Well, there you have it. DIY activities that is sure to keep your toddler entertained, learning, and most importantly, having lots of fun. If you liked this video, please consider liking and subscribing and hitting the notification bell. I have a ton of ideas to help make learning fun for both you, your toddlers, or preschoolers. With all that being said, thank you so much for watching, and I hope to see you in the next one. Bye!