Toddlers and Preschool

I’ve been feeling guilty lately… the mom guilt we are all so familiar with. Am I doing enough? Mainly I’ve been thinking about Little Miss and whether she is being enriched enough, or if I’m just pacifying her to keep her quiet throughout the day. I started thinking about about starting a casual toddler preschool program at home.

I found a couple things that looked interesting, but then after watching Little Miss for a couple days with these programs in mind, I’m realizing that at 23 months she just isn’t ready to sit down for much of anything scheduled in the day. I do know that she is learning quite a bit each day through various things we are doing, so I decided to make a more conscious effort towards providing more of these experiences. Some things we are doing now and plan to expand on:

Learning Sign Language: We started this when she was pretty small, but I wasn’t consistent with it until we picked it back up when we got some Signing Time DVDs from the library. I can’t believe how much her vocabulary has blossomed after we have started signing! Now she can practice words I wouldn’t normally recognize right away. For instance, “hungry” is hard to understand when she says it, but I recognize the sign. This helps her learn how to say the word correctly while still being understood. We still get the DVDs, plus we check out some books to increase our signing vocabulary also.

Introduce Colors: Of course we have books that introduce colors, and I’m going to aim to point out more colors in our every day world. I printed out some cards, part of this Color Cards and Emergent Readers pack and I’m planning on doing some matching activities when she seems willing.

Stories from Qur’an: We have a few board books covering the main 6 prophets: Adam, Nuh, Ibrahim, Musa, Isa, and Muhammed (peace be upon them) but I really need to expand our library. I have some books that are better for the 6+ age group, so inshaAllah I’ll be getting some more books, and I have my eye on some books from Goodword.

Introduce Numbers: This is easy to do in every day life, and there are so many library books to introduce the numerals also. We’ve been working on the concept of one, which I think she understands in the context of “one more” or “only one”, so that’s a start! Since she’ll be two in just a couple weeks, that’s a good time to start the concept of two, inshaAllah!

Care Bear was in daycare at this age, so I felt like she was getting the enrichment she needed, if at the very least from the very cool toys they had! What have you done with your kids to enrich their play time?