Farm Toddler Center

We are all rested up from vacation and ready to get back to routine. This week’s “toddler center” is farm themed! We of course made sure to incorporate our numbers, sensory play, reading and pretend play. We also added some activities that can aid in speech development. These are different things that our current speech therapist does with my boys during therapy.

Sensory Play

This week I included two different sensory boxes. One box focuses on identifying the animals and making their sounds while playing with kinetic sand. Vincent LOVES playing in this. And can you blame him?? Have you ever ran your fingers through this? If only all beaches in the world contained it… notice there is blue, brown and green kinetic sand. This way the boys can learn to distinguish where each animal is found. For example, although you may find a pig in the mud at the farm, you may find a duck in the water. So they belong in the blue sand!

The second sensory box focuses on developing fine motor skills like pouring. For Maxwell (3 yo/nonverbal) I will focus on the actual skill of pouring. I typically take out all of the animals except one so he doesn’t have too much overload when working on this skill. I typically have to place my hand over his and show him exactly what I want him to do while saying “let’s feed the cow.” Direct communication like this helps Maxwell to understand exactly what I want for him at this time. He is only three so I expect him to do this three times and then I allow him to free play until it’s time to move on. He has learned to follow simple directions from this type of play. Also, Each time he pours into the animal on his own I give him HIGH praise, similar to what you would do if your toddler peed in the potty for the first time. So that we can reinforce that behavior.

For Vincent (5) we will use all the animals and the cards. Each card has an animal and a number of scoops displayed. For example, if there is a cow and 5 scoops it tells your toddler that the cow needs to be fed 5 scoops. We typically do 5-10 cards. Depending on Vincent’s attention span that day. This develops counting, fine motors and following directions. These specific cards just have visual prompts so no problem if your kiddo isn’t reading yet!

The next activity is just some Play dough! This week we are making pigs to stick with our farm theme. Squiggly eyes and fuzzy tails for the win. Maxwell hates the texture of play dough, so when we play I typically just have him put on my eyes and tail.

I was surprised when Vinny actually ran his hands through this sand! This activity is very simple. I got the sand tray in the target hot spot for $3! It came with the alphabet, so I just changed out the cards to match our farm theme so that we could work on writing numbers. This is one of our new favorite screen free activities.

We also improvised some sensory play this week to work on some spelling!

Farm Books

Pretend Play

All farmers have to prepare their crops right? This week we will do just that. The tool bag, water jug and book all came in a kit off of amazon! These are made of metal too so we can use them outside come spring. The brown basket came from the dollar store and it is filled with pumpkin seeds. Each “seed package” is labeled with the type of vegetable and how many belong in the package. The boys just pick up the allotted number of pumpkin seeds and place them in their correct package. Fine motor skills and counting at their best!

Speech

Preposition Magnets- these pictures were just goggle images that were printed off and laminated. Self adhesive magnets were placed on the back of each picture and so they can be easily moved on a dry erase/chalk board like pictured. The barn remains in the center so that the children can work on prepositions. “The cow is above the barn.” “The farmer is beside the barn.” There are several different scenarios that can be used with this simple activity!

These books were printed off teachers pay teachers. They were written by a SLP. They are interactive and allow you to see how much your child is actually comprehending by testing their knowledge. “A pig in the mud.” Each page gives a hint of what animal belongs, the boys then take the picture from the card and place it in the book. This teaches them to follow directions, animal sounds and where each animal lives.

Fine Motor Skills

We are trying to incorporate more pretend play with Vincent’s therapy so we made a fence with legos and added some green construction paper and walah a green pasture to place the cows after we put them together!

That wraps up our farm theme activities for this week! Stay tuned next week for our back to school center.