When your babies are little, you play with stacking rings and shape sorters. You slide beads on a maze and practice with peg puzzles. When they are older you build puzzles, arrange little figurines, and enter the world of legos. Wooden blocks and their building derivatives (magnatiles, duplos) are good for all ages. But what else can you play in that in-between phase? What sorts of skills can we work on together? Here are three ideas for games you can play with your two year old!
Educational Games to Play with Your Preschooler
Two year olds are experts at categorizing items! They are learning their colors, and most astounding to us as parents, their vocabulary is increasing by leaps and bounds. To help them in all these skills we read lots of books together. Starting at about a year old and onwards, our kids have especially loved books with photos of real objects they can learn to name.
By the time kids are two, their attention span is starting to increase. For indoor days, I love to find ways to work on fine motor and language skills. (And I’m sure our neighbors appreciate the break from all that gross motor running around. Ha!) So here are three games you can play with your toddler / preschooler. Bonus: they are all inexpensive and don’t take up much space!
1. Lotto
This Lotto Game by Ravensburger is excellent for so many reasons. The board is set up like a bingo board, except that you have to fill your board with cards to win. We put all the cards facing down and take turns flipping over a card and seeing if we have the matching image on our board. If we don’t, the card goes back on the floor face down and it’s the next player’s turn. The Lotto game is great for toddlers because:
- It is great for practicing taking turns. Even if we don’t do it perfectly, it helps your child learn to play cooperatively.
- It is great for increasing vocabulary. Our version has pictures of animals and we practice calling out the name of the animal on the card we flip over.
- It is a memory game. You must remember which card was returned to the board, if you have the matching animal.
Can our two year old play perfectly? No. But her vocabulary is increasing, she’s practicing playing together with us, and remembering to pick up the right cards. From experience I can say that three year olds have a great time with this game, and by four they can definitely play correctly, following all the rules.
It looks like the version we have is no longer available, but I found a similar game made of wood that looks great. And for a really budget alternative, I would suggest any simple memory game to have the same effect. You could even print out some images (in pairs, of course) and make your own DIY memory game.
2. Working on Word Associations
One way to really help toddlers sort their world is by talking about associations. I find that my kids naturally make these type of statements: “look, this is like the plant/toy/book we have at home”.
This game called Can You Match It? is a great educational addition to our house. It is set up as pairs of associated pictures that puzzle together: great practice for those little fingers. As my toddler works on the puzzles we talk about:
- Naming the objects on the cards, often times in multiple languages
- Describing characteristic of the objects, particularly colors and shapes
- Explaining what we do with these things (The candles go on the birthday cake. The birthday girl blows out the candles. When you have a birthday will you also want a cake? etc. etc.)
3. Magnetic Dress Up
We have several sets of magnetic dress up, like this one. They are little magnetized wood dolls, and magnetic articles of clothing. Once again, this is a toy that is great for vocabulary and conversation, in addition to working on fine motor skills of lining up the pieces on the doll. I also like that it is more open-ended and provides for endless creativity by combining the various articles of clothing. Some talking points:
- Parts of the body
- Naming articles of clothing, shoes, eyewear etc.
- Talking about characters and jobs
Bonus Ideas: sorting, coloring and puzzles
These three specific games have been really great tools in our household to work on all these skills, and in particular on vocabulary. Because we are a trilingual household, there is always some push and pull on speaking all three, and these games provide an alternative to “just” reading books and conversing in regards to our day to day habits.
At the risk of stating the obvious, there are many more ways to work on fine motor skills with your two year old. Coloring and play dough strengthen their little hands. Building puzzles, train tracks and buildings of all types work on spatial skills. And sorting! Toddlers love to sort things: by color, by size, by shape. I hope you found this post useful!
What are your favorite games to play with your two year old? Aren’t they just the cutest?
