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 the five senses —
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.
While this wasn’t a major departure from Susie’s lesson plan, we adjusted the fingerpainting activity to be scented! It was so easy to just add one drop of flavored extract to a dollop of paint to kick the activity up a notch; you don’t need much since extracts are super potent. *Note: be sure to keep a close eye on your littles just in case the yummy scents inspire them to give the fingerpaints a taste test. 😉
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 found this great matching game on Etsy to help make associations with each of the Five Senses. it was fun to go through and discuss each item with Sophie and why they went with each Sense.
I try to mostly source activities 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!).
In this case, I thought utilizing our Mrs. Potato Head worked out well because she has all of the body parts to demonstrate the five senses! I printed out some images for Sophie to match the parts with and after completing the activity we reassembled Mrs. Potato Head however Sophie wanted to design her!
We got Sophie the Yoto Player recently and it’s been a BIG hit! If you have a Yoto Player or a TonieBox I think they’d be great for showcasing the sense of “hearing” to your toddler!
It took me AGES to decide which audio player to get for Sophie — I was torn between buying the TonieBox and the Yoto Player for the longest time (maybe a year?!?) and @kellyinthecity recently wrote a detailed post in favor of the Yoto Player and upon review it sounded like that device would be the right fit for our family. We’re not totally opposed to screen time (it’s a great tool when we need it), but it’s nice to have an alternative to use instead when we need to cut back on screen usage. Sophie loves that she can swap the cards out herself and flip through the stories with the controls — I may need to get the mini [travel friendly] version as well!
For a Sense of Smell activity I sourced some images of foods that corresponded with some scented stickers that we have, printed a page, and let Sophie match them up. It’s fun to scratch’n’sniff the stickers and let Sophie make those associations… admittedly many of the stickers were also placed on our arms and hands, but this was a really fun (and simple!) activity for us!
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!
*You could also use scented markers for a little added element for this unit.
For this unit I chose: a Mrs. Potato Head matching activity and a sorting activity related to all Five Senses, fingerpainting (for Sense of Touch), used our Yoto Player to listen to stories (for Sense of Hearing), some “I Spy” activity books (for Sense of Sight), and a scented sticker activity (for Sense of Smell).
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 have a couple of books related to the five senses, so I’ll add those into the rotation.
Sophie and I enjoyed using “I SPY” books to illustrate the Sense of Sight. Obviously, reading is already demonstrating using vision, but having to visually search for something feels like taking it a step further.
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 Five Senses song was pretty cute and we liked this episode of Caitie’s Classroom!
I typically try to make something edible with Sophie as part of each unit in this program, but we deviated a bit for the Five Senses. We didn’t exactly create anything, but rather took the opportunity of being in the kitchen to do sampling of sweet, salty, and sour items to explore our Sense of Taste!
We decided to use a slice of lemon to demonstrate sour flavor, potato chips as our salty item, and strawberry ice cream for our sweet example!
I also thought this loud vs quiet snack sorting activity was a fun twist on this section, especially because you can incorporate using multiple senses!
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I found this list to be a pretty good resource if you wanted to do even more crafts and activities related to the five senses 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 her 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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