I’m using Busy Toddler’s “Playing Preschool” Program with Sophie this year and it’s been so fun! We’re loosely following the Seattle Public School Calendar and began our at-home preschool play activities the first full week of September. Sophie is only two so we’re not fully in preschool mode, but I wanted some loose guidelines and ideas for semi-educational activities to do together.
If you’re also interested in setting up a few educational activities at home with your toddler I can’t recommend this program enough. Susie has thought of literally everything, and while the curriculum document size may feel a bit intimidating (at a whopping 339 pages!) there’s so much helpful information packed inside. Plus, some pages are just spacers between units or alphabet letter printables, etc. so don’t let the sheer page volume scare you.
Susie provides many helpful details, such as the “why” behind the program design (why the activity was chosen and what it is helping your child learn, the why behind the specific order of lessons, why you should follow the recommended structure, etc.), tips on how to teach the program as well as maximize your child’s reading / comprehension, occasionally offering alternatives for taking an activity a step further if your child needs a more advanced option, and, most importantly, she reiterates that the goal of the program is not mastery of the topics, but merely exposure. I can’t tell you what a relief it was for me to read that in the curriculum’s introduction — it really took the stress out of it for me!
Susie did such an amazing job creating a no-stress, fun-yet-educational curriculum. Each day’s worth of activities only equates to about 45 minutes’ worth of engaged activity that can be done all at once or spread throughout your day — it’s intended to be flexible to work with your schedule (which I love and appreciate so much). I find that 45 minutes out of my day dedicated to doing educational activities with Sophie has been really easy to incorporate and a beneficial addition to our daily routine.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, but I think that the best part about the curriculum is not having to research and come up with my own “lesson plans”. I was not trained to be an early childhood educator like Susie, so I wouldn’t even know where to begin; having the structure of this curriculum is truly a godsend.
This post has inadvertently become a bit of an ode to Susie (and I’m not mad about it! 😂), but I felt like you deserved to get a little insight into my reasoning for choosing this particular program and why I love it so much.
Okay, back to clothing —
I’ve slightly modified a few of Susie’s activities to make them a little bit more age appropriate for Sophie (since we’re technically following this program a year earlier than it was intended) and to utilize items / toys that we already have at home.
Since all of Sophie’s socks are basically the same socks there wasn’t much variation to create a challenge for the [real] sock matching activity in this unit, so we adjusted to using printed and cut out socks instead. I also love that on top of the matching aspect, we also added the fine motor skill of practicing that pinching motion to clip the pairs together. I’m a big fan of two-fer’s that can teach multiple things concurrently!
In addition to Susie’s awesome program, I’m trying to incorporate a few more [super easy] play activities to do over the course of the two weeks that coordinate with that unit’s theme. The activities aren’t too intensive and I am only including them to make the curriculum even more robust, but they’re totally unnecessary. You really only need to follow the program — I’m just using the unit themes to *also* help guide our playtime (especially for the days when I have run out of ideas! 😵💫).
I mostly try to source from our existing toys and just reimagine new ways of playing with them for each unit. You can always plump up your play with a few affordable items from Bullseye’s Playground at Target, Amazon, Joann’s, or Michael’s Crafts. I also love to utilize items / books that we already own (many of our favorite items are from Lovevery shipments!).
I just grabbed a few of the items that are already in Sophie’s little kitchen area for this activity, along with a measuring spoon as a scooping tool, repurposing the buttons from the above color-sorting activity, and instead of the recommended cornmeal I blended up some stale Cheerios and used that “dust” in our bin instead to hide the buttons. Sophie had a blast searching for all of her buttons!
I like to look for printable images that can be used for coloring or super easy crafting activities — you can purchase printable downloads on Etsy or find free coloring pages / activity pages on Google where you can find printable images related to any theme. We have a decent little printer at home so I fall back on this option quite often and Sophie loves to use her crayons!
I thought it might be fun to print a page with pair of sneakers on it, then cut them out and use them to practice threading laces through!
For this unit I chose: a sock-matching activity that also included the fine motor skill of pinching a clip to keep the pairs together, a button color-sorting activity, we used these flash cards to learn all of the names of clothing, accessories and a few details (like zippers and buttons), a fine motor skill activity of learning how to thread a cardboard shoe (currently just working on threading the holes), and a button excavating sensory bin activity.
I also include Sophie when I am doing laundry whenever it makes sense. She helps me with age-appropriate tasks like loading both the washer and dryer, pressing the on/off and start buttons, and bringing me hangers to put items up to air dry. We always name each item as we move them from the washer to the dryer.
I also found this adorable idea for imaginative / dramatic play for littles to pretend they’re at a laundromat! How fun?!
I like to source additional books from Sophie’s little library that complement the theme of the unit, but sometimes I like to take the opportunity to snag another option or two (you can never have too many books, right?!). We already have a few books related to clothing, so I added those into the rotation.
We don’t utilize a LOT of screen time, but sometimes it’s fun to watch something together so I’ll try to find a YouTube video, an episode of an educational show, or even a movie that corresponds to that unit’s theme. This little episode of The Super Simple Show on Getting Dressed was cute!
We did a little cookie baking — to stay on-theme, we baked button-shaped sugar cookies! Sophie doesn’t really have the patience to make a homemade dough with me at this age so I used a shortcut and bought a roll of sugar cookie dough. After baking them she helped me press them to make the indent that gives them their classic button shape and then created the button holes with a straw. These would also be excellent for gifting around the holidays if tied with a festive ribbon or classic baker’s twine!
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I found this list to be a pretty good resource if you wanted to do even more clothing-related crafts and activities with your little one.
I’d like to note that we don’t plan to homeschool Sophie longterm… the idea behind utilizing this program is to give a general introduction into a bit of light educational structure to her day as well as a little exposure to what she’ll be seeing when she does start attending school. I don’t have anything against homeschooling (more power to you!), but I am personally not cut out for being a full blown at-home teacher (at best, I could maybe help with homework – lol) and that’s why I outsourced this Playing Preschool to Busy Toddler. That said, this program would be an excellent foray into homeschooling if you’re considering that journey for your family!
You can find my other series of posts with complementary playing preschool ideas here.
I hope these activity ideas are helpful for you and your little one.
We’ve got this, friends!
Sending hugs —
xx, Natalie
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