Created by a mom to teach her own child, Teach My Toddler is a complete basic skills learning system ($39.99 plus tax and shipping). It comes in its own neat little pack with five foam puzzes, 4 sets of laminated flashcards, 4 poster-size teaching charts, 4 board books, and a parent teaching guide. As an educator myself, I was very impressed how creater Christy Cook put this together. Click here to see a video demo.
Skills this kit supports are the alphabet, numbers, shapes and colors. You can use this for 20 minutes a day to build pre-reading skills. My son is now 33 months and much older than the recommended start age of 18 months for the kit, but we found we could use this kit to build on what he knows. An example of this is — since he knows his basic colors and shapes, we used this kit to teach him the color grey. Of course he had seen the color, but we never really called attention to it.
My son has terrific letter and number recognition, so we used the kit to teach the sequence of the alphabet and numbers. This is something I had been doing orally with him, but it was much more effective when my son could see it visually. My husband and I was thrilled to see a lower case alphabet puzzle, along with an upper case one (we own many an alphabet puzzle, but it’s usually upper or lowercase, seeing both cases was great). . We loved the posters so much that they will be going up on our wall for my son to reference with us and it hellps that the graphics look cute too. We found that the flash cards, while a wonderful idea, was something my toddler wasn’t ready for yet — but they will be perfect to tackle in the upcoming months. As a teacher myself, I would start teaching with the books, then the puzzles, then the posters, then the flash cards. Don’t be afraid to use the kit with your own child, the teaching guide that Cook wrote is ideal for guidance and quick reference. She also gives plenty of activities to build on the kit. Cook is developing more kits to teach past the toddler stage — I can’t wait to see what they look like!
Shop Teach My Toddler.
Flat rate shipping – $5 for Canada, $10 for any mainland US state (excludes Alaska and Hawaii).
I saw this last month at the Toronto Children’s Trunk Show. Looks great! The only reason I didn’t buy one then and there is that we’re moving and if I buy it, I have to pack it 😉 Once we’re settled in again, I think I’ll order a kit online.