Playful Learning for 2 & 3 Year Olds
Your child can learn so much before you ever start thinking about a curriculum. The main skill I taught my kids at this age was the phonetic alphabet, meaning I focused on teaching them the sounds the letters make, before teaching them the names of the letters. This was an intentional choice, because while they do need to learn letter names, in order to read, the most important thing to know is the sound each letter makes. Only vowels will ever “say their name” explicitly, so the other letter names aren’t very helpful in early reading. By the time they knew almost all of the phonetic sounds, I introduced letter names and we’d play the same games using the names and/or sounds.
You don’t have to start with the phonetic alphabet, but regardless of what order you teach letter names and sounds, its helpful to remind yourself the correct sound each letter makes. Most adults add an “UH” sound at the end of many letters. This habit can make it harder for your child (especially for learners that have dyslexia or other learning differences) to blend letters into words later on, because it’s adding a sound into words that shouldn’t be there. For instance, think about how we pronounce the word bed. A child that learns B says, “BUH” and D says “DUH” may struggle to figure out the word bed, because they hear, “BUH-EH-DUH,” when they try to blend it. If you say bed out loud, there is no strong UH sound after the B or D, but some kids struggle to get rid of that extra sound if they’ve learned the letter sounds like that. Here is a great video from Toddlers Can Read that explains some of the most common pronunciation mistakes people make and how to pronounce each letter sound correctly. By starting with phonetic sounds, my oldest’s first instinct was to say the phonetic sounds of the letters when he saw them in a word, instead of the name, because that’s what he had associated with them the longest. Similarly, I usually focused on lowercase letters more so than uppercase letters, because when we read, we see way more lowercase letters than uppercase.
All these games are quick set-up and multi-sensory. Any time you can combine movement or the senses in learning, you are maximizing the brain’s ability to learn. Little kids want to move, so these games capitalize on that! Here are some of our favorite, multi-sensory games you can do to start learning through play:
The Race Game
Grab a piece of chalk, choose 4-5 letters, and write them on your driveway or a park sidewalk. Then, tell your child what letter to race to! “Ready? Race to /sss/!”
As your child gets more confident recognizing the letter sounds or names, switch out a few for new letters, but keep some they are confident with in the mix as well. Keep these games light-hearted and balanced with a combination of things they know confidently and what they are still learning. If they are learning letters for the first time, point out each letter and say them together before you play. After a few rounds, they will start to recognize them. The goal is low-pressure exposure and fun.
Knock-Out the Letters
One of my favorite purchases I’ve made for preschool homeschool activities are the cards pictured here from Toddlers Can Read. They are really durable and we’ve put them through the ringer, as will become obvious as you read about the next few games, and they have held up really well.
For this game, you could easily grab a few pieces of scrap paper, write some letters on them and tape them to your toy of choice. I pick a few letters, lean them up against some type of toy (I’ve used cones, toy bowling pins, stuffed animals) and line them up somewhere a ball can be thrown at them. If your kiddo is learning letters for the first time, point to each one first and tell them what the letters name/sound is and then, hand them the ball and say, “Ok, can you knock down /c/?!” What kid doesn’t love permission to throw a ball and knock things down!? It’s super easy to play as many rounds as you want. I often stand up our nugget couch and set up some toys with letters along the edge to play this inside on a rainy day. It’s always a hit! (See what I did, there?)
The Hop Game
This is just an indoor version of the race game, but we hop from letter to letter instead of race. You can use a bunch of letters all over the room or just a few in a small area. You can also choose a different way to get from letter to letter every time. “Fly to /sss/! Crawl to /mmm"/!”
Once they have played the game and begin learning the letters well enough to remember them on their own, I will play with them and we take turns. They get to tell me where to hop! This is great recall practice for them and adds a twist to the game they love.
Open-Face UNO
Counting is a pretty straight forward skill to expose our kids to. You can count anything, anywhere! But we did start playing open-face UNO as a family when our oldest kids were only 2 and 3 and it was really fun! It also happened to be great color and number recognition practice. If you aren’t familiar with UNO, it’s a very simple card game that requires either matching the number or color of the previous card played and the goal is to get rid of all your cards first. To my children’s delight, it also has SKIP and “Draw 2” cards, among others, that allow you to mess with other players along the way. It was perfect for our 2-year-old, because even though he wasn’t really recognizing numbers, he could follow along with matching colors (in fact, I think UNO played a significant role in teaching him his colors) and our 3-year-old could do both. Of course, we help them when needed, but our oldest caught on to the rules surprisingly fast and didn’t need our help long. While playing UNO open-face is going to negate some of the strategy, who cares!? They loved the independence of playing by themselves with their own cards and we loved playing a game that we could enjoy too. Playing together provides a great opportunity to model how to manage the emotions that come with losing and with winning. In our house, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose- that goes for kids, too. But, we always emphasize how fun it is to play together regardless of the outcome!
Bonus Holiday Game: Sneaky Gingerbread Man
Another simple game we played around the holidays was this alphabet hide-and-seek game! I cut out the letters and taped them all around the house. Then, we pretended the sneaky gingerbread man was hiding our letters and we had to go find them! As they found each letter, I’d ask what letter sound they found and they would happily report back without realizing they were practicing their recall of letter sounds (and if they didn’t remember, I’d remind them). My boys absolutely loved this game and asked to play it over and over again. Remember that a lot of the fun of these games comes from your willingness to buy in to the imagination of the game with them. Kids love to imagine and they love it even more when their favorite adults imagine with them!
This printable is free in my shop! Check it out below.
I hope some of these ideas help you have some low-pressure fun with your kiddos! You can play these for just 5 to 10 minutes at a time sporadically and I bet you’ll be surprised how much they learn. Have fun and happy learning!
