Purposeful play week

It's been a difficult couple of weeks for Peter as he has had a really nasty chesty cold so we haven't been doing much with him in addition to activities he was already joining in with. 

He has loved playing 'football' with his soft Ikea ball in the hall. We stand at each end and kick it to each other or throw it or roll it and I say the word as we do it (he repeats it sometimes too). This is great for building vocabulary and good exercise and gross motor skill practice too.

I really like Ikea toys. They are quite basic and I think that the most valuable toys have open play value and don't need lots of moving parts/lights/noise. Our Ikea toys are often played with and popular.

We have been doing lots of jigsaws. I am really pleased that both boys like jigsaws as I do too. These are great for developing fine motor control and early maths skills such as problem solving and pattern matching. Peter now spots the correct piece and tries different ways to get it to fit. We also talk lots about the image in the jigsaw while we are doing it and when it is finished.

We have been playing 'shape truck', another of our Ikea toys. Peter sorted the shapes into groups and then put them into the shaped holes and delivered them to us. We asked for a particular colour or shape to help him recognise them. 

We played with the shape sorting puzzle. Peter can do this easily now but still enjoys it and we talked about the colours and shape names as we did it.

We used the lovely Counting Colours book again to count things of different colours. Peter is getting quite good at counting now and can pretty reliably count to 10. This book is great for building vocabulary too as there are so many different objects to name.