Teaching Activities For Toddlers

Kids love to play and they love to explore and learn. In fact, learning IS fun for kids, and there's plenty of fun and interesting ideas and activities that you can do with your toddler that will help them learn and have fun at the same time.

Reading Activities - take time to read stories out loud with your toddler. Reading helps your child learn, develop language skills, and also increases his or her vocabulary. You don't have to spend a whole lot of time reading to your child - 15 to 20 minutes a day is plenty. Sit in a comfortable spot with your child on your lap or beside you, read out loud with dramatic voices, and point to where you are reading. Afterwards, you can discuss the story you've just read with your child to help enhance their understanding.

Arts and Crafts - Doing arts and crafts is another big fun event around our house. These activities provide ample opportunities for the child to work with different types of materials and tools such as paper, cloth, glue, markers, paint, cardboard boxes, and so on. It's a great way to cultivate creativity and imagination. Some basic tools and material you should have around house include:

• scrap books and scrap paper
• construction paper
• coloring books
• pencils, crayons, markers, paint, and brushes
• glue, scissors, and rulers

Through arts and crafts activities, you can help you child learn about a variety of subject matters such as learning about colors and shapes. You can have a lot of imaginative play by making hats, glasses, masks, wings, or whatever you can imagine out of construction paper, and with cardboard boxes you can make pretend houses, tents, shops, or whatever you can think of.

Numbers and Counting - Help your child learn  the numbers and learn to recognize number by playing a connect the dot game. This is a simple activity you can make yourself. Simply place a piece of paper over an image (anything you like) and make a dotted outline of the image - do not make the dots too far apart, or too close together. After you've completed making the dotted outline, write a number beside each dot, starting with "1", and do so in a consecutive manner until all the dots have been numbered.

The next thing is to let your child connect the numbered dots. Start with "1", of course. As you and your child work through connecting the dots, say the numbers out loud, and give your child an opportunity to look at and say the numbers. Alternatively, instead of using numbers, you could also use alphabet letters going from A to Z instead.