The Mitten – Easy Winter Toddler Activities
Winter is a great time of year for indoor toddler activities. With so many great winter books and ideas, it’s easy to put together themed activities. This week we have already read The Gingerbread Baby and had fun with these Montessori inspired animal matching activities. Today we added The Mitten by Jan Brett to our learning space.
The Mitten Book Activities for Toddlers
Easy Winter Toddler Activities
Lacing is always an excellent activity for young children. It helps their fine motor skills, hand muscles, hand-eye coordination, concentration, and much more. Even if they have mastered the lacing, it is still a great exercise to do, and the kids like it.
You can find this Mitten lacing card at 1+1+1=1.
Pairing activities with books is a great way to pack a lot of learning into short amounts of time. We all know that toddlers don’t usually like to sit for very long, so if you pair a story with an activity you have a fun-filled 20 minutes, and the child is excited about it.
If you have several toddler activities already organized and easy to set out, it makes your days flow so much better. Not to mention you and your children will be learning, cuddling, and making memories.
Matching is also a great activity for you to do with your toddler. Going with the theme of the book, we used mittens for making pairs. One of the many things I love about the Montessori philosophy is Maria Montessori believed in using everyday items for learning experiences. So grab a few pairs of mittens and your child can work on matching them.
You can also expand this lesson by using the mittens for patterns or sequencing them (small, medium, large/1st, 2nd, 3rd). So many different learning opportunities with one great book and a few things you probably already own.
“Education is a natural process carried out by the child and is not acquired by listening to words but by experiences in the environment.”
~Maria Montessori