Tag: busy toddler

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Playing Preschool Round ✌🏽

A few years ago I started Busy Toddler’s Playing Preschool curriculum with my oldest. She was about three years old at the time and I wrote my review on the curriculum here. 

And now I’m back in the same position with my second child, utilizing our Playing Preschool guide once again! We trekked down to our storage room in the basement and pulled out the tape, dot stickers, pipe cleaners, and paint. We even dedicated a little corner in our home and call it the preschool room! 

Our Melissa and Doug calendar is set up on the wall and we start off our preschool day with poems and songs just like we did in the past. 

This is my second time around with the Playing Preschool curriculum and I am impressed all over again! It truly is learning through playing. As Susie from Busy Toddler promises, there are no worksheets and nothing complicated. It’s just everyday supplies gathered and utilized to help little minds grow and learn. A few things I’ve learned the second time around: 

  • I’ve taken the pressure off of myself to accomplish every single activity outlined for the day. Some days we get through it all, other days I see that learning isn’t happening and we need to take a break for the day. 
  • The repetition of one unit for two weeks can feel really… redundant for adults. After the 7th day of the apple theme, I didn’t want to look at or talk about apples ever again! But the repetition for those preschool-aged minds truly is crucial for learning. 
  • One of my cons on my last review was the hard time I had finding books to use because the pandemic shut down a lot of resources for finding what I needed. However, this time around with libraries open, it’s been much easier. After going through each of these units a second time, I’m more aware of what the needs are with the books used and can change and adapt the books as needed. 
  • The most important part of the entire Playing Preschool curriculum is to have fun. If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong! 

Have you purchased Playing Preschool? What are your thoughts on the curriculum? 

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My Review On “Busy Toddler’s Guide To Actual Parenting”

I recently bought the book Busy Toddler’s Guide To Actual Parenting and want to share my honest review with you. If you’re thinking about purchasing her Playing Preschool guide, you can see my review here.

Please keep in mind that this review is not sponsored or endorsed in any way, these are all my own thoughts and opinions. 

Overall: This is a great parenting book! I feel like Suzy and I are old friends in another life, we are so similar! So that did sway my opinion in ways. However, I loved that she began the book with a preface that she didn’t really like parenting books, so she wrote one of her own! And did it beautifully by the way. The overall feel of her book is that parenting is hard and comes with a lot of challenges, but these challenges are manageable and she has tips to share to get us all through them. 

Things that particularly stood out to me:

*The pictures she includes of her family and kids, which make the whole book feel more relatable. It’s not as much a “preachy” book full of “I-know-more-than-you” type of wording, it’s full of her real-life experiences and how she managed as a mom. 

*She advertises it as an “activity” book as well because she includes 50+ activities to do with kids. I was worried this wouldn’t be applicable or helpful for me because I could just follow her Instagram account. Or I didn’t want to read one big list of activities and be overwhelmed by different things to do with my kids, making it not actually helpful. 

However, this wasn’t the case! They are strategically placed throughout the book where they made sense and lined out exactly what you need, how to do it, and even a picture to show the setup! For example, after a whole chapter on taby’s (not quite a baby anymore, not quite a toddler yet), she finished the chapter with a section of taby activities. 

They aren’t activities you will be doing right at that moment, obviously. But it does make it easier to flip through quickly and pull up an activity to do with your kids, and they are especially easy to find since there are pictures of where the activities are! 

*There is a whole chapter on tantrums that completely changed the dynamic of our home. It was so good! 

*A lot of her ideas were just little steps to get you through parenting. There wasn’t anything huge you needed to understand or accomplish, she just teaches simple ideas like, “teach your child to use a code word when they are struggling to avoid tantrums.” 

As far as cons go, I honestly could not find any. It is organized well, the activities are doable as a parent, and the whole book feels very relatable. The only minuscule thing I might be able to think of is that it’s very directed at parenting young kids, and won’t help as in-depth with parenting pre-teens/teenagers. However, it does really niche down the book to make it very applicable instead of having a broader perspective. 

Susie Allison wrote a great book, one I would recommend to any parent in the early stages of parenting. I have gifted this book to many friends that all agree, it is a great parenting book! 

If you’ve read it, what do you think about it?