I'm bored  Need ideas for a 2 y/o
Moms View Message Board: Parenting Discussion: I'm bored Need ideas for a 2 y/o
I am really bored with all of my therapy toys. I play Mr. Potato Head, farm, doctor, train, magnetic puzzle, playdoh diner, dollhouse, etc. at least 5x/day for 3 days a week. My dept just got a very little cash for each therapist to spend (about $70) and I am so ready for some new toys!!
Please share with me some favorite toys for ages 18 mos-2.5 yrs. They have to be durable because they will be used and abused for about 30 hours a week every week. I also don't like or need electronic or noisy toys because my goal is to get kids talking and making the noises--not the toy doing it for them. I also need toys geared primarily to boys. 75% of my caseload are boys and I already have dolls, dollhouse, cooking stuff, etc.
Also, if you have any links to some simple crafts for this age I would really appreciate it. I've become a boring therapist and I hate that, but I'm out of ideas. After 16 years of doing this I'm running out of steam. Please help me help my babies to have fun when they come to speech. TIA!
Hi Pam,
Can't say I have any particular favourite toys these days, Matthew really enjoys wooden shape puzzles, but since the warm weather hit we spend a lot of time outside. His favourite thing these days are measuring cups, spoons, bowels etc. he's very much into pretend these days.
Here are some of my favourite kid friendly/craft sites, hope you find something you like:
Creative Learning
Printable crafts for kids
KinderKrafts
One of my favs.
Toddler Station
Activity Village
Making Friends
Artists Helping Children
Connor's speech therapist uses a fake knife set and cuts fake veggies and fruit that use velcro to stick and they can pretend to cut.
She also has a lot of kitchen stuff like a coffee pot and cups as well as a baby einstein book that has a mirror on all the pages so she can show how her mouth moves with the sounds. (You see her reflection up close and also her mouth move while she makes the sound.)
Connor loves ALL of it.
Here's the book:
Book
Here are the veggies and fruits:
pretend play
The food set Heidi mentioned is highly motivating for lots of kids, although I got mine (slightly different but same concept) at Wal-Mart (there are two sets, one is fruits and veggies, and the other is meats). It's a Kid Connection toy so look in the "red" aisle.
Another favorite activity that can be geared to target lots of skills and ages is a container of animal counters with five colored cups. The intent is to teach counting and colors but if you get the set with varied animals, you can also target animal names or sorting by animal instead of by color, and younger kids who aren't ready for sorting yet can also play with them just by dumping and pouring and scooping, so you can target empty and full, or following simple directions, or mine and yours (pour some in my cup, now dump your cup, etc.) I never cease to be amazed at how long kids attend to this. Also available at Wal-Mart in the educational section near the school supplies, some Wal-Marts have bear counters with cups, other Wal-Marts have animal counters without cups, I got both sets and combined.
There are tons of different types of this toy available, but another really fun one for kids is animal bowling. Mine is a wooden bowling set with ten pins and a different animal on each pin, and we can work on the animal names as we pick them up each time and name them, or counting as we count how many they knocked down, etc. There are plush ones available too, but I like wooden toys. :o)
Alphabet blocks are good too, but I don't like the ones you typically see in stores with the line drawings because kids don't pay any attention to those at that age. I have some wooden alphabet blocks that are a little larger than those and with full color pictures on each side. Those are great because you have four pictures per block to work on naming and most kids, especially boys, love to build. And so many other skills you can tie in to this one too, of course, like the sorting cup activity.
You said magnetic puzzle but I always use various wooden peg puzzles and flap books for pretty much every session too, depending on the vocabulary the kid is working on. Even kids that hate books are usually drawn in by flaps... and I usually shop Goodwill and dollar stores for my books so very little money invested. There's also a Melissa and Doug set of TEN wooden puzzleboards that are strictly shapes (5 boards, double-sided) with wooden colored circles, ovals, triangles, and squares that fit the boards. Some are very simple with only three shapes, and others more complex. And most are boy-oriented (they are painted pictures of things like train, firetruck, boat, bird, fish, etc. with shapes missing, like circles for the wheels, rectangles for the body of the vehicle, etc.) I got this set at Toys R Us for 5 bucks! Great for colors, shapes, AND simple vocabulary.
Wooden beads for lacing are pretty popular too, and I use them for not only colors but for "I want..." or for signing "more" to receive each bead.
Most of these also target fine motor so even though it's not your particular skill, kids get a double benefit.
For those older ones, I also have to recommend Cariboo... games are so hard to use with kids this age, but this game is highly motivating and kids LOVE it. Also, while it teaches colors, shapes, letters, and numbers, I use it for other things too. I made a Boardmaker template so I can make cards to fit the doors on the game, so I can make my own set of vocabulary cards or words working on certain sounds to match anything I'm working on with any kid, and they're easy to just slide in over top of the cards the game came with. I don't use the stack of cards when I play this way, I just let the kids pick which door they want to open and say the word. HIGHLY motivating for your 2 yr olds, and great for working on those early skills to teach them to play a game, like turntaking and following directions.
You can spice up your Mr. Potato Head with more parts, if you haven't already done so, I have a huge bag full of various parts I've found different places, Disney parts, animal parts, etc. Can then do the simple version by just choosing the parts for them and saying the single word, or can give them choices, work on two word phrases, etc. (do you want the red boots or the blue shoes? do you want blue eyes or purple eyes? etc.)
Oh, also wanted to say simple crafts -- blopens are fun for your oral-motor kids and they can't blow them hard enough to make a mess, I've found. This can get expensive though since I give the kid a pen then let him keep it rather than attempting to sanitize them. But I only use it for kids who really need oral-motor work.
A fun easy one I've found is to go to a crafts store (even wal-Mart has some but not much variety) and buy buckets of foam pieces, there are colored shapes, animals, vehicles, etc. Very simple on your end, you get out the bucket and a piece of paper and a glue stick, and the kid names what they want to glue.
I also will print out sheets of pictures with Boardmaker working on the particular sounds or vocab I want and let kids just glue those on construction paper. At that age, just glueing paper is fun and new.
My boys favorite thing at that age was small animal toys, or small army men. You can buy "tubes" of animals at walmart I think.
My newest fav craft I read, was to take tempra paint (ready to paint) and to freeze it in ice cube trays with popscicle sticks, then when frozen you paint with them. Sounds like lot of fun to me. But I haven't tried it.
We also use AOL Cd's and color on them with markers, glue tissue paper, use stickers on them.
Hmm let me keep thinking of stuff.
I LOVE all of the Weebles toys and the Little People sets. They have so many of them, farms, towns, garages, etc.
We also like the Littlest Petshop toys. They come with different animals that you can use in different sets.
Have you thought about Rescue Heroes? They have the large sets, but they also have the smaller ones that my ds loves. The small ones make no sounds. They have different ones, like Snowy Mountain, a Submarine, an Aircraft carrier, and others.
How about getting the large packs of fake food and grocery items, and a little toy cash register and play store. My kids have always loved that. And depending on your area size, you could get a plastic shopping cart, also. This was always one of my kids favorite things.
If I think of more, I'll post!
Oh yeah! For boys, have you ever considered getting one of the rugs that have the roads and buildings and such on it, and then buying age appropriate vehicles to play with? Or depending on time, you could use posterboard, or big sheets of paper, and draw your own "city" with the child telling you what to draw, and where.
FYI: they now have all the superheroes in big, chunky figures, designed for little hands.
My suggestion would be some Discovery Toys. Look at Garage Sales or even Ebay. They have a Lifetime Guarantee so if any of them get broken DT will replace them free of charge. I can even take care of replacing them for you, it's really easy to do.
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