Free Themed Preschool and Toddler Activities

I stumbled upon a website with a great set of free activities. The authors have created themed sets of learning activities for toddlers and preschoolers. The reproducibles are downloadable in .pdf form. I downloaded all of them because I'm a collector and I'm like that.

I decided to start with the Transportation Theme Pack because transportation is popular with both my children. I did not print out every activity included with the pack because I didn't feel like my two and three year olds were ready for the letter tracing and writing activities just yet. I did print out the matching transportation picture/word cards, the shadow matching activity, the tracing lines activities, the 3-piece puzzle cards, the bus size sequencing activity, the counting cards, the left and right sorting cards, and the beginning-sound word cards. I printed most of them on cardstock and I may even laminate them. Here is a picture of some of the pages right after I printed them and a picture of the materials once I cut them out.

We have already tried the shadow matching activity and the number cards. The kids enjoyed them. They identified the vehicles and their colors. They practiced counting and matching. Michael worked on number recognition and Ava worked on her speech a little ("on top"). We had fun and there are several more activities left. You could easily play with the materials for a week, put them away for a while and pull them back out again in a couple of months and do it all again.

The Preschool Packs currently available are:

• Pond Life
• Peter Pan
• Knights
• Princess
• Transportation
• Doctor & Nurse
• Astronaut
• Solar System & Beyond
• Gardening
• Fireman
• Policeman
• Pirate
• Birthday Mini-Pack
• Cars
• Batman
• How to Train Your Dragon
• Birds
• Candy
• Robots
• Toy Story
• Gingerbread Baby
• Thanksgiving
• Nativity

The Tot Packs currently available are:

• Batman
• Cars
• Dinosaur Train
• Handy Manny
• Hermie
• Nemo
• Tarzan
• Thomas
• Veggie Tales
• Word World
• Brown Bear, Brown Bear
• Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
• Five Little Monkeys
• Very Hungry Caterpillar
• Big Machines
• Dinosaurs
• Farm
• Feelings
• Monsters
• Ocean Animals
• Pond Life
• Winter
• Christmas
• Valentine's Day
• Easter/Spring
• Noah's Ark

You might also be interested in the following articles:

Magic Tree House Progress Chart

Macaroni Colors

Reality Check

When we started all of this Ava had too little speech to give her any kind of formal articulation assessment. You can't ask an essentially nonverbal child to label pictures in a book so that you can score how well they did making sounds. Now that Ava has so many words her early intervention therapist and I decided to give her an articulation test to see where she is.

The Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation 2 is very simple in concept. It is a book of pictures. Your child labels the pictures and the Speech-Language Pathologist transcribes how your child pronounces each word exactly as your child says it. The test is designed so that after all of the pictures have been pronounced your child has attempted to pronounce every consonant sound (and some blends) in every position (beginning, middle, end) of words in which they appear in the English language.

We gave the test to Ava. It took us two sessions. There are a lot of words on the test and it is hard to get a two year old to focus. She did better than I expected. She got sounds on the test that she doesn't usually get in regular conversation. I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing.

Then I scored the test. She got a standard score of 72. That's equivalent to the 7th percentile. That means that 93% of children her age perform better than her on this test. Wow! Seeing that number was a huge reality check for me.

I've been so focused on all the improvements. She's made amazing progress since we started getting her help. She had no words. Now she had more than I can count. She went from one-word utterances to two and three-word phrases. Now we are frequently hearing four and five-word sentences. She was a pretty silent toddler who wasn't even trying to talk any more - a toddler who had to resort to gestures and pulling me around to ask for what she wanted. Now she talks all the time. She communicates with her parents, grandparents, brother, teachers, and friends. She even talks to herself. She tries to sing and hum. I was proud. I was excited.

Now, with this new number (7th percentile!) I am sad and discouraged again. I know that this new information takes nothing away from all of her accomplishments. I do know that. I know that this new information is a valuable reality check. It gives me information I can use to go forward and plan our next steps. As a speech-pathologist the test results are interesting, valuable, and even a little exciting. As Ava's Mama, those test results make me sad. They are a reminder of her struggle and the long road that is still ahead of us. Reality really stinks sometimes.

How did he do it?

First there was the redecoration of the room. Then there was the disassembly of the dollhouse. Then, following today's adventures in not-napping, we discover this:

Notice the new gold knob on the lower drawer. So, where exactly did he acquire the new knob?

And where did he put the old knob?

But here's the thing. How did he do it this time? There was no screwdriver in the room!

We obviously need to get this boy some kind of outlet! We're thinking erector set maybe?