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 why I chose this particular program and why I love it so much.
Okay, back to food —
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.
In this unit Susie suggests two similar fine motor skill activities so I sort of combined them into this baking themed activity in our beloved sensory table! I love that the activity combines both motor skills as well as a sensory experience so it’s a two-fer! Sophie loved playing with this setup so much it occupied her for nearly an hour.
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 printed out pages with the main food groups (Fruits, Vegetables, Starches, Meats & Dairy) for Sophie to match her play foods to their pictures. We repurposed the food group sheets for coloring pages after completing the matching activity.
*Note: I created these collections with free images I sourced on the internet, but I found some additional pages with very similar designs: Food Groups 1 // Food Groups 2 // Food Groups 3
I mostly try to source from our existing toys and just reimagine playing with them in fun ways. 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’m especially crazy about these super cute foods from Learning Resources! All of the items are so realistic and well made; I’ve never seen any color wear off (rub, chip, etc) and I love the textural details that really make them look like their real counterparts. I highly recommend these faux foods for playtime.
Sophie has this precious little range that she loves to play with and I thought that instead of just using the whole fruits and vegetables that we currently have (and love!) it might be fun for her to have a few little “meal kits” that are designed more for play cooking. Thankfully, our favorite play food brand offers just that! We bought the pasta & meatballs and stir fry kits and they’ve been big hits! Sophie also received this pot and pan set with her stove and she absolutely loves them because they seem more realistic than the plastic items that come with the kits.
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 search for free coloring pages / activity pages on Google where you can discover 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!
For this unit I chose: a few printed pages used both for sorting play foods into their food groups and then repurposing for coloring, dramatic play with Sophie’s little range, a sensory play bin with a baking theme, in addition to playing a matching game using her play foods + a couple of her food books.
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 quite a few books related to food, so I’ll add 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.
For this unit we watched “Ratatouille” on Disney+ as well as “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs” on Prime Video. For more ideas, check out this post!
On Susie’s Busy Toddler blog she’s shared a super easy method for making ice cream at home in plastic Ziploc bags! Sophie had SO MUCH FUN shaking the bag — highly recommend doing this activity with your toddler. The whole activity was a big hit, both the making AND the eating of the ice cream.
We chose to make strawberry flavored ice cream (Sophie’s been on a big strawberry kick lately) so it was a bit modified from the chocolate ice cream “recipe” that Susie shared in her post — we adapted this recipe from AllRecipes and it turned out great!
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I found this list to be a pretty good resource if you wanted to do even more food-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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