Early Pre-K at Home: How To Teach Toddlers

Toddler development quickly became my top priority with being a stay at home mom and today I want to tell you all of the ways I have found to incorporate early Pre-K education into our lives. All of these ideas can be adjusted to where your toddler is at and what works in your home. We started slowly adding these things in from the time my son turned one.

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I have broken the article into two categories with four sub categories each to better suit your child and family.

Play Involved Early Pre-K Learning

Play involved learning will probably be most fun for you and your toddler. Take these ideas and have fun with your little while teaching skills and growing their imagination.

Sensory Play

As most of my regular readers will know, I am an extreme advocate for sensory play. Life skills can be practiced as well as fine and gross motor skills and imagination. If you haven’t already check out my previous sensory play articles here.

• 8 Great Sensory Activities for Babies and Toddlers
• Sensory Play: The Ultimate Guide for Toddlers and Young Children

Art

You can start art projects with your littles really as soon as they can sit up but as they get older you can really add to their skill set with art. Using colored pencils, markers and crayons are great ways to build your child’s writing skills while working on their imagination. Paints not only make a great sensory experience when using fingers, but also builds creativity and color theory knowledge when using water colors. Ive added out favorite art supplies below.

Outside Play

Playing outside has SO much to offer our children. No matter where you live you can get out in all seasons and teach your kids. I highly recommend trying the 1000 hours outside challenge to get your kids even more excited and hold yourself accountable to do it with them. Im going to add the book I’m currently reading with 100+ outdoor activities to try, its incredible. Some great simple ideas are building snowmen, going on scavenger hunts, playing with chalk, etc. We also LOVE our water table in the summer and it works great for an outdoor sensory table as well.

Montessori Style Open Shelves / Independent Play

Independent play is truly magical for your kids, they use their imaginations way more when they have full concentration in an activity. I use Montessori style open shelves with activities/toys set out and rotate weekly to keep the excitement up. I will have an article next month going over the best educational toys to purchase for toddlers and why but I have listed some of my sons current favorite toys below.

Some kids struggle to play alone more than others so if your little one has a hard time with this start slow. Get them invested in an activity along with you and begin by taking breaks,(go start laundry, start a meal, go to the bathroom) then come back to play again. Gradually add more time to being away and after a few attempts you will see they begin to just do it alone. If you feel bad about this like I did in the beginning, remember the skills sets and creativity it builds for them. It truly is important.

Sit Down Early Pre-K Learning

Sit down learning will probably not be of value to you or your littles until later on outside of reading of course. My son started to do well with these activities at 2. Follow your kids lead and never stress it if they aren’t interested.

Reading

Reading can and should obviously be started from birth but at around 18 months we started to really focus on the amount of reading we were doing and the style of books. Choosing books that are short enough to hold your child’s attention and easy enough for them to be able to learn the words are extremely beneficial. Around this time also consider incorporating learning specific books, stories that target letters, numbers, colors, whatever you can currently looking to master with your child. We stick to one learning topic at a time to lower the chance of becoming overwhelmed or frustrated. Some of our favorites are listed below.

Flash Cards

Flash cards provide a great direct learning experience for toddlers. The thicker large flash cards are great to put out on your open shelves when your kids are smaller to start to familiarizing them with animals, colors, shapes, etc. When my son turned 2 we introduced thinner, more specific flash cards as trivia that I help him with. We have a favorite set for the early Pre-K years that I will list below along with a few others. Definitely don’t push the trivia, follow their lead. My son seems to really enjoy that part of our day, thats why it has been added to our daily schedule. Make it fun and get them excited.

Learning Time

This can look so differently for everyone but we use learning time to go over all the things we already know everyday to keep the knowledge strong. We also use this time for our daily “Early Pre-K tasks” like going over the current month, season, our word of the day we are learning etc. We have a banner from Doce Lar that we do this on daily and it makes it easy but the Target dupe below is a great price. You can also use this time to count your child’s favorite toys, point out what colors they are, what shapes are on them, etc.

Music

Music was previously discussed in my 5 Daily Activities For Skill Building and Child Development article but I want to express the importance of this. Listening and experimenting with different instruments can help with identifying sounds, learning beats and even build language. You can also take time each day to just have a dance party. Turn on some kids tunes and just bond with your littles. Expressively sing them the words and help them learn to sing with you. Not only will it be a ton of fun but it will be beneficial for their language.

Thats it for today lovelies!

Thank you so much for reading along another week. My creativity is flowing again and I have so many good posts coming soon. Check out my TikTok @gabbykoren for daily content. Repost this to your Pinterest or other socials below to come back and read later or share with your friends!

XOXO

Gabby Koren