Family: 4 Activities to Make Your Toddler Smile

I so enjoyed our Valentine’s Day activities and I didn’t want to let go of that love theme we’d been exploring, so I decided we would spend the rest of February exploring “Family” as a theme. Here’s what we did:

Literacy/Pre-Reading and Color/Pattern Recognition: Paint Sample Family

we worked on some letter and pattern recognition to tie into our family theme. The best part was that this activity is completely free. I mean, there’s a little thievery involved at your local hardware store, but if they didn’t want their paint samples to disappear, they shouldn’t have made them so pretty! I’d include directions for this activity, but I think it’s pretty self-explanatory! I also put down some of our Grapat gnomes from Danny and Luca and our cute Holztiger farm dog (from D&L, as well).

Sensory Bin: Find Your Family!

I wasn’t sure how to approach a “Family Sensory Bin”, but then I remembered our cardstock family photos from last year’s “All About Me” theme. I buried the family and then put her Ocamora rainbow houses on the ledge. I told her she had to first find her family and then find homes for them. I gave her the sensory bin tools from Chickadees Wooden Toys and she went to town! Not only did we work on the names and identification of each family member, but she even built some families to stay in the same house. She put Daddy and Nana in the same house (my mother likes him better than me anyway), and I was living with my brother.

Color Recognition: Color Houses and Peg People

I found this amazing resource on TeachersPayTeachers for super cheap. Paired with our homemade rainbow peg dolls, we’ve got a lovely family activity. The blue family needs to find their blue home, the green family needs their green home and so on. She loved it. And its perfect for this dreary weather we’ve been having.

Small World Play: Family Values in Frozen 2

This was one of those amazing finds on Etsy that just inspired a huge invitation to play. Penny Pegs makes handpainted peg dolls and we recently received Anna and Elsa from Frozen 2 in the mail. I decided to create the world of Frozen 2 for Vicky, complete with a magic water horse, a dam, and both an Enchanted Forest and the magical river, Ahtohallan. I’m pretty stoked how it turned out.

Meet the Makers:

• Anna and Elsa – Penny Pegs
• Unicorn AKA the water spirit, Nøkk – Ostheimer Wooden Toys
• Playsilks – The Gnome’s Treasure Chest (find her group on FB!)
• Blue mountains – My Big World Playscapes
• Mirror Blocks – Guidecraft
• Pebbles, Frames, element stackers – Grimm’s Wooden Toys via The Wooden Wagon
• Red trees – Papoose Toys via Danny & Luca (PEARLS10 to save)
• Tri color nins – Joguines Grapat via Danny & Luca
• Green trees, assorted loose parts – Chickadees Wooden Toys (PIEDMONTPEARLS to save)

Well that’s it! Did you try any of our activities? Comment below and let us know how it went!