I love books! I’m a busy Mom these days and it seems like I almost never read for leisure anymore, but I love reading books to help better my family especially when it brings fun activities to our home. Child’s Play is a wonderful resource for any family with many summer easy activities.

Child’s Play: Montessori games and activities for your baby and toddler is the perfect book for any new Montessori family. The easy to follow Montessori activities allow parents and teachers to entertain and teach children through purposed play. As a busy, work-at-home Mom, it is great to have to many activities in one, easy to grab book. Child’s Play is one of the first books I added to our collection and after many years use it as a constant resource.
Child’s Play  is 159 pages of awesome activities and templates. I love that the activities are divided by chapters like Coordination and Out and About. The chapters open with a development timeline with the appropriate age level listed. This helps parents understand their child’s developmental level.

The activities are typically one to two pages long with pictures to accompany descriptions. (Quick and easy for busy mom’s to read over!) The activities have a list of materials needed  and step by step instructions. Each activity has listed the suggested age for the activity, but it is stressed to know your child’s abilities. Some children are ready for harder activities sooner than others. I want to share 4 of our favorites from this book.

1. Wacky Races

Samuel was 18 months old when we first put together an activity in this book called The Wacky Races. (Look how sweet his little face is!) The age for this activity was listed as 1+ and we found all the materials in my craft boxes. Total price to put this together $0! Re-purposing is my middle name.

2. Play Dough Recipe

Part of The Wacky Races is to make play dough to use as the track. Samuel helped me make the play dough recipe that was also an activity in the Arts and Crafts chapter of Child’s Play. Although this did have some parts that needed a stove, Sam loved being apart of the process.

3. Treasure Map

We have had many pirate adventures that steamed from the Making a Treasure Map activity in this book.

4. Role Play

Making a Treasure Maps works really well with the Role Play activity too. The kids love dressing up and acting out parts. Depending on how much fun they have we focus our learning with these activities and read books about pirates or bring our map with us to the park to see what we can find!

I recommend this book to anyone working with infants and toddlers. After having two Montessori children, this book has been heavily used and is always a go-to for rainy day activities.

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Happy Reading!

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