Learning Activities For 2 Year Olds, 3 Year Olds, 4 Year Olds And 5 Year Olds

In this article we will be sharing specific activities for 2 year olds, 3 year olds, 4 year olds and 5 year olds that will help them to learn about their world and develop important skills. These activities can all be performed indoors, and will either be free or cost a small amount. What is important is to use these activities to develop your child’s learning development as often as you can.

Learning Activities For 2 Year Olds

These 2 year old activities are fun to do, and will all help with developing your child’s skills. Children between 2 and 3 years of age will have a limited attention span, so it is recommended that these activities for 2 year olds are performed for short time sessions. You can certainly mix them up each day so that your child enjoys the variety.

Go Fishing

This is a game with a magnetic fishing rod and a set of fish that are either color coded, have letters on them or numbers on them. You can buy a magnetic fishing set at the store or you can make one yourself.  You should be able to find fish with the letters of the alphabet on them online, and you can print these and cut them out. Stick them to cardboard or laminate them to make them strong.

Securely fasten a paper clip to the mouth of all of the fish. Find a round wooden stick which does not have any sharp edges or points, and attach a magnet to this pole with either string or yarn. Make the number fish and the colored fish in the same way.  You will need a tray to put the fish on, and then you need to show your 2 year old how to fish. Spread the fish out so there is less chance of “catching” more than one at a time.

Now tell your child to catch a fish with the letter B on it. Or a green colored fish. Or a fish with the number 9 on it. Make sure that you go through the entire sequence in a game. So ask for all of the individual letters of the alphabet, the different colors that you have chosen and the entire number range.

Learning To Read

Yes it is possible to teach your 2 year old to learn how to read. Once they have learned to speak they are ready for reading. Your child has so much to gain from learning to read early. Tests have proven that kids are generally smarter when they have learned to read early, and tend to do a lot better in academic tests. It is a wonderful gift to give your child.

Learning the letters of the alphabet is the right place to start. It is important that your child can identify all of the different letters and learn about the sounds that they make (phonics). This is the foundation of learning to read. You can help your child do this by buying plastic letters from the toy store, or finding the letters online and then cutting them out and laminating them.

Here’s a good idea. You can make the letters of the alphabet from sponge so that you can play with your 2 year old in the bath. Make the letters wet, and your child can stick them to the side of the bath. You can ask them to stick the letter T on the bath and so on.

Phonics instruction and the development of phonemic awareness (understanding the different letter sounds) is the key to effectively teaching your child to read. There is a very easy way to ensure that you are teaching your 2 year old correctly, and that is to get assistance from a proven, fun, reading program.

The Children Learning Reading program from Jim Yang has worked for thousands of parents and is very inexpensive. It uses the phonics instruction and phonemic awareness principles, and will teach you how to deliver easy and fun reading lessons to your toddler. Everything that you need to effectively teach your two year old how to read is included in the program. Learn more about the Children Learning Reading program here.

Sorting It All Out

This is one of the easiest activities for 2 year olds and it will help with the development of their organizational skills and provide some math development too. What you will need is an array of different colored items that you can find at home or at the local discount store. Pom poms are good for this, or you can use bean bags or straws. You will also need some baskets or containers of different colors that you can either make or buy.

The first thing that you can do is ask your child to put the yellow items into the yellow container. Once they have done this ask them to count how many items they placed into the container. You can vary this activity by mixing different colored items in all of the containers, and asking your child to sort it out so that the right colors are in the right containers. At the end of this count the number of colored items in each container. Great fun!

Learning Videos For 2 Year Olds

Young children enjoy watching funny cartoon videos, and they can learn while they are doing this. Just go to youtube.com and search for “learning videos for 2 year olds” and you will be amazed at how many are returned. There are videos about colors and learning the alphabet, and there are songs that your child can memorize. They have great animal characters in many of the videos. Be sure to watch the videos with your child to increase your bond with them.

Learning Activities For 3 Year Olds

If your child is between 3 and 4 years old then there are some great 3 year old activities that you can do with them. When your child is at this age, they will have slightly longer attention spans and will be able to tackle more ambitious projects.

Help Them With Subitizing

Subitizing is where your child can instantly recognize the number of items in a space. It is a great skill to learn, and will help your child with numeracy and counting as well as improve their judgement skills. Think about throwing a dice and instantly recognizing the number of dots that are shown. This is subitizing.

We are going to use a dice and some small pom poms or counters that your child can place on subitizing pictures. You can create the pictures yourself, or find them online to print out. Your child will roll the dice and add the corresponding number of counters or the small pom poms to the picture. Then they will roll the dice again and add more. Once the picture is complete you can count the total number of counters and then explain the math behind it.

If a subitizing picture has 12 spots you can explain that 5 + 3 + 4 = 12 or whatever the dice combination was. If your child throws over the required number then still play the game and place the extra counters at the bottom of the picture. Count as before and explain the math.

You can use the subitizing pictures to place a certain amount of counters on them and ask your child to tell you how many are there. Start slowly with 2 or 3 counters and gradually increase the number. In no time at all your child will be able to instantly recognize how many counters are there.

Learning Videos For 3 Year Olds

All you need is a computer and an Internet connection and you can find some great videos for your three year old on youtube.com. Just search for “learning videos for 3 year olds”. Most of these videos are short and great fun for your child. They can learn about all sorts of things and will really enjoy the experience of watching these videos with you.

Reading Challenge

Gather together a number of easy to read children’s books and place them on the table. You will then challenge your child to read as many books as they can with your help if they need it. This is one of the best and easiest 3 year old learning activities that you can do, but it assumes that your child has some elementary reading skills at 3 years old.

If your child cannot read then you can teach them by using a quality reading program. Some of these programs cost hundreds of dollars, but there is no need to pay anything like that for a high quality, proven reading program. Jim Yang’s Children Learning Reading program has everything that you need to teach your 3 year old to be a competent and fluent reader in no time. Find out more about the program here.

Shape Play With Felts

With this activity your 3 year old can use shapes to make face pictures on a board. You will need a few things for this activity, including a felt board and some felt sheets that have a sticky back. You will need to create the board from something fairly solid so that your child cannot destroy it too easily. Cut out a large circle of felt and then stick it to the board.

Now you need to cut out individual shapes from the other felt sheets. Cut out circles, half circles, quarter circles, squares, triangles and rectangles and make them all different sizes. The idea of the game is that your child will use the different sticky felt shapes to create human faces or animal faces such as teddy bears, cats, dogs, pigs and so on. This will help your child to be creative, and they will want to play this for ages. Create several felt boards so that they can make a number of different faces.

Learning Activities For 4 Year Olds

By the time your child is 4 years old they will have increased their vocabulary and be able to dress and undress themselves. Drawing shapes will be simple for them, and they will be able to do other things such as stringing beads. There is a lot of learning going on at this stage, and these 4 year old activities will support this growth.

Dominoes And Counting

This is one of the most effective 4 year old learning activities for improving counting ability. This domino game will also help with other math skills such as addition, subitizing, matching and sorting.

To play this game you will require a set of wooden or plastic dominoes and some colored tokens that can be placed on the domino dots. It would really help if the dominoes are large in size. These can be purchased in most toy stores for a small amount.

Now get your child to start matching the dominoes so that the numbers of dots are the same. Ask them to apply the colored tokens onto the dots as they count them. Ask them to tell you the combined number of dots that two dominoes make. Tell them to form a chain of dominoes with the right numbers matching each time.

Use Lego And Play Tic Tac Toe

One of the most popular activities for 4 year olds is playing with Lego bricks. If your 4 year old does not have a Lego set then you can get a beginner set fairly cheaply at a toy store. You can even buy second hand sets on eBay.com.

Make a drawing of a tic tac toe grid and ask your child to make this with Lego. You may have to help them with this initially. They will need to use the slim long bricks for the grid and then they can play the game with the square bricks, using two colors such as black and white.

Teach them how to play the game if they have never played it before. Once they understand it let them win a few times, and then make it more difficult for them so it becomes a challenge. They will enjoy playing this game with you for hours.

Learning Videos For 4 Year Olds

Watching videos is a great way for kids of any age to learn new things. Just go to youtube.com and search for “learning videos for 4 year olds”. There will be math videos, reading videos, songs and so much more. Watch the videos with them as often as you can and learn the songs together.

Letter Activity Games

There are a number of letter activity games that you can play with your 4 year old. Choose a letter, for example letter D, and then ask your child to think of things around the home that begin with this letter. Examples could be your dog, drapes, draws, diapers and so on. You can go through all of the letters and try to find items. Some will be tricky such as Q and X.

You can play this game about animals too. Kids like animals, so have an animal book ready or use the Internet. Find animals that begin with each letter. There are some examples in our letter series articles here.

Don’t forget to take a look at Jim Yang’s amazing reading program Children Learning Reading that will help you teach your child to read in the quickest possible time.

Learning Activities For 5 Year Olds And Over

When you have children of 5 years old you will find that hands on learning will work the best for them. Their motor skills will be more developed, but they will still need some assistance from you. The following activities for 5 year olds take this into consideration.

Learning Videos For 5 Year Olds

There are a lot of preschool videos on youtube.com that are suitable for 5 year olds. There are videos about the planets, the body, math videos and other educational stuff. Just go to YouTube and search for “learning videos for 5 year olds”.

Make A Road System Using Tape

Here is one of those 5 year old learning activities that is very easy to do and a lot of fun. Most 5 year olds like playing with cars, so you can make a road system together that they can use the cars on.

You can either construct your road system on a hardwood floor or on a large sheet of hardboard. If you are going to go for the floor option, then use primer tape that will not harm your floor. First sit down with your five year old and plan out your road system on paper. Once you have your plan you can use the tape to create the roads. It will keep them amused for ages.

If they have a toy car that they sit on then make the roads wide and bendy so that your child learns to steer correctly to avoid the tape lines.

Measuring Pictures

This is one of the best 5 year old activities for math development. You will need some cut outs of items such as cars, animals, fruits and other everyday things, and then create a board with smaller versions of these images on them where your child can record how wide or tall they are.

Your child can start off by using play bricks to measure, or you can jump straight in with a ruler and teach them feet and inches (or centimeters and milimeters). You also want to encourage them to tell you if an item is shorter or taller than another or wider etc. Then you can get them to show you the tallest, shortest, widest and so on. Measuring and comparing is a very good math skill to learn.

Story Questions

You will need to read a story together and then you will ask your 5 year old questions about it. You can ask them about the names of the characters, and ask them to tell you a bit about them. This can be whether they are male or female and what they enjoy doing. Come up with other questions to make them think such as “what do you think would have happened if Jack had not found the magic door?” and so on.

If your child is having difficulty with reading, then you can help in a big way by using Jim Yang’s Children Learning Reading program. It is very important that your child becomes a fluent reader and enjoys reading. and Jim’s program will show you exactly what to do each day.

Give your child the gift of early reading and make them smarter than other kids. The Children Learning Reading program is all that you need.