Our Favourite Toys for 2 to 7 Years Old

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“As parents and grandparents, we think that we are showing children we love them by giving them things.  In fact such practice, in and out of itself, may send them the wrong message.  Children may conclude that if people give you things, they love you.  If receiving things tells you that you are loved, the next logical step is to measure self-worth by what you have, not by what you are.  The reality is that very young children can only truly love one doll, one stuffed animal, and a few toys at a time. This experience provides a basis for adult life where one must learn to cherish one spouse, one family, one life, instead of fantasizing that it is possible to ‘have it all’.”  - MONTESSORI FROM THE START

We don’t have a lot of toys at home.  Mavi just like two kinds of toys: LEGO and dinosaur/animal figures, that’s just it.  All through the years, I don’t splurge nor buy toys as we don’t have the budget for it. I consider them as luxury so I just gave toys to Mavi as presents on his birthday and Christmas.  But because we “home” school, I purchase learning materials that my kids see as “toys” but in reality they are NOT really toys.    And because I am frugal, I buy toys that they can grow with, MULTIPURPOSE and something that they can play together.   So let me share with you the kids’ favourite things in the house.  These are the toys that we have in the house, except for the ones in my “wishlist and basket”.  These toys are being played day in and day out by the boys.

NOTE:  ALWAYS SUPERVISE YOUNGER CHILDREN WHEN USING ANY OF THESE TOYS.  Do not leave them unattended.

FAVOURITE TOYS

LEGO, DUPLO and PLAYMOBIL.  Need I say more? These are the favourite in the house. We have plenty of LEGOs as this is Santa’s favourite present EVERY Christmas for 4 years!  And Vito’s Duplo and Playmobil were brought from the local store when they were on 50% off. I would never get them for a whole price! Vito is now snapping bricks together and loves the Playmobil people.  Both of my boys spend hours and hours playing with these toys.  They never get tired of them.  Perfect toy for creativity, concentration and developing fine motor skills!

For Playmobils, we have castles and pirates. They’re Mavi’s favourite toy and can play with them for hours!

My son loves the LEGO CLASSIC Bricks.  He doesn’t really like those with premade designs as he always wanted to design his own thing. So I highly recommend that you buy the basic LEGO BRICKS especially if you are getting your first Lego.  Having a plate is also good. 

 

 

miniLUK and BambiniLUK.  Mavi and I looooves this! We can’t get enough of answering all the booklets, especially those tricky ones!  I bought the Starter Pack and bought the advanced booklets separately.  There’s a version for younger kids, the BambiniLUK and some friend in Instagram said that they like it. Mavi is like “Mom, its making my brain tired LOL”

 

Montessori Botany  and Zoology/Insect Puzzles, Montessori Puzzle Maps.  I invested on these this year and it was worth it! I have puzzle loving kids, and Vito is currently addicted to them.  Aside from educational, these puzzles are also perfect for pincer grasp practice.  Mavi on the other hand is obsessed with my Asia and Europe puzzles.  He loves geography, loves to learn about countries and their locations.  Tower High Learning is my favourite Montessori shop as of the moment and this is where I purchase my materials.

 

Schliech Animal Figures and Safari Toobs are also an all time favourite in the house. The uses of these figures include imaginative play, learning about animals, habitat play, exploring landmarks and just about anything!  You see these mostly in my post!  When Vito was younger, I made him use Schleich animal figures because they are bigger but now that he has overcome his mouthing, he uses both Schleich and Safari Toob. Mavi is obsessed with dinosaurs, and he uses them now as characters for his homemade videos LOL.   Now he uses both types for play and learning.

 

 

Hape Uppercase, Lowercase and Number Puzzles.  With Mavi, I used the Melissa and Doug Magnetic letters (I still have them) and they were really really loved.  Now the problem is Vito mouths things and I made Vito use it, the sticker of the letters were removed.  So I looked for an alternative alphabet toys for us to use and I discovered these amazing puzzles from Hape. They are WORTH-IT! We love using them in anything, from learning letters, puzzles to stacking! Yes, Vito loves to stack these together! We also use it to sort out colors!  Multi-purpose indeed!  But if you have older kids, Melissa and Doug Magnetic Letters are as good as well. 

   

Because I love to cook (Asian and Italian), the boys also love to pretend cooking with me using these Melissa and Doug cooking toys.  They can play for hours with these!

M-cro Maxi Scooter.  And I just have to include this!! Because they play with this scooter in and out of the house! Mavi uses this to school and Vito uses this indoor for scooting practice. I love that it is sturdy and kids can easily balance!

And of course, nothing beats classic toys like balls, cars and PlayDoh!  My boys wouldn’t complain if they receive any of these this Christmas.

WISHLIST

Magnatiles. Rave reviews everywhere but I just couldn’t bring myself to purchase these tiles or can’t even justify it   Maybe when they’re 50% off I would probably get one for the boys!

Unit Block.  I know that the boys will love this as well.  They can build and create so many things with this but the price is just too much for me.  I still have to think about this a million times.

Beleduc Puzzles.  My puzzle loving kids will love these puzzle series, especially the Your Body Layer puzzles!

The Study of Northern Europe

Mavi and I are looking into the different regions of Europe and we started with Northern Europe (of course, that’s our location!).  So as not to be overwhelmed, we only focused on 4 countries:  Denmark, United Kingdom, Ireland and Sweden.


So to learn about Northern Europe we have the following activities:

Letter ‘t’ Sound Activities for Toddlers

 

Vito’s activities last week revolves around the letter ‘t’.  As you all know, we’re working with letter sounds for a while and funny how he’s able to name alphabets using their sounds these days instead of their names LOL.    The unit is not just actually a week’s work, but it took us 2 weeks TO get over with the materials and activities, because Vito kept using them! Let me share with you activities we did to explore and learn objects with the letter ‘t’ sound.

Lettet T Object Basket.  Let’s start with our object basket.  I filled it with 3-4 objects starting with letter t that Vito uses a  lot at home like torch, telescope/binoculars, teeth and Titanic LEGO made by Mavi.  Then added a few letters like this foam letter from Munchkins (Vito used to bite these!) and the all time favourite letters from Hape.

Train Shape Cards.  I made these! I’m so happy on how it turned out.  The train plus the DIY air dry clay shapes are currently Vito’s favourite activity. He loves matching the shapes to that in the train! 

That’s his brother’s sleep mask (from Emirates), which is his favorite accessory as of the moment.

Color Sorting using Transport Counters.  The counters are from Learning Resources and this is one of our favourites!  The train cards are DIY: using a train coloring image, I printed it in different colors of cardstock and laminated it. 

He worked on them but doesn’t stay long. As I previously said, color sorting is NOT his favourite thing as of the moment.  But even so, I still would introduce different kinds of color activities just in case he might find his interest.

Counting.  Vito loves to count, it’s like effortless in my part to make him count and identify numbers.  He counts on his own and is always giddy whenever he sees numbers.  So this turtle activity is his favourite.  We just don’t have enough turtle figures to count up to 10 LOL.  The turtle counters are from Safari Toob.  We previously worked on trees as well for our letter t unit. Check it out here

Brushing of Teeth Teeth.  Our model of mouth/teeth is just so awesome! Vito is fascinated with this and loves brushing it with his toothbrush LOL.  This is a wonderful practical life activity, especially to those little ones who are hesitant to brush their teeth   Know where you can get these teeth model here.

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Science Experiments: Making CRATERS

Such a lovely activity for my kids! We had fun dropping balls of all sizes here and there.  

Objective:
1.  To identify the type of surface where craters are formed.

Materials Needed:

an aluminum foil, the bigger the better

soft material like a newspaper, a rug or towel

balls or rocks

Procedure:
1.  Lay the soft material in the ground like a newspaper a rug or a towel.
2.  On top of it, lay the foil.

3.  Stand at the edge of the foil and drop the ball or rock at the center of the foil.  Note be decided to use the mini basketball because we realized that golf balls made a small impact.
4.  Repeat this process on a hard floor.  This time it was Vito’s turn to drop the ball.

5.  Examine both pieces of the foil.
Findings:
The ball that was dropped in the foil on a soft surface (first image below) made a larger impression compared to the foil lying on a hard floor (second image).  You can immediately see the impression when the ball is dropped in a soft surface!  Look at them, they look like craters!

You can barely see an impression here, but Vito did dropped the ball a few times.
What happened?
The ball that was dropped in the softer surface sank, allowing more of the ball to be pressed against the foil.  In effect, this created those “holes” in the foil.  This is similar to the case of a meteorite (stone or metal in space) when striking a soft surface, it creates a larger imprint that are shaped like holes called craters.  Craters are best formed when meteorites strikes soft, powdery surfaces like that in the moon!  Why not check out real pictures of the surface of the moon from NASA!

You might also want to check our previous science experiments:

• Why do stars twinkle?
• Solubility of different substances in water.

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Learning the Timeline of European History

I am thrilled to share with you our approach to learning the timeline of European history. As I mentioned earlier, my son is fascinated by world history, particularly the events in Europe and Asia (his home continent!). So, while he was exploring his interest, I took the opportunity to delve into the rich history of Europe. To accomplish this, I created these beautiful timeline cards that feature bold pictures (because kids are drawn to pictures) and include a brief description of each historical event. I conducted thorough research and handpicked the major events that were included in the cards. We were already reading the books of the Story of the World series, but most of the events in the cards were not mentioned in the book.

Europe Continent Study for Grade Schoolers

We are revisiting our Europe study, this time I’ve decided to take it by regions.  But before we dive into that, we reviewed some of the things we’ve learned in the past years.

Europe Continent Study: European Regions

Here’s a new study for this year, learning Europe through its regions.  Here I was showing Mavi the divisions and the boundaries in the map.  I bought this map years ago at Montessori Print Shop.  So we’re doing a color code here based on our map in Europe in a Nutshell.  Blue for northern Europe, red for western Europe, green for eastern Europe and orange for southern Europe.

FREE Safari Toob Tree Matching Cards

Download here or click the image.
Vito uses these cards a lot in my post on TREE ACTIVITIES and even in random days, he would pick this up from shelf and work on it.
You can get the Safari Toob Tree miniature objects from here.