Kids•Reviews•Teaching with Games

Learning Through Play with My Fun Set

This post is sponsored by SimplyFun. One of the biggest challenges for me as a homeschooling mom is finding ways to keep my youngest kids busy during our school hours. At 18 months and 3 years, Felix and Greta are excited to be involved, but aren’t always the best classmates.

While their number one favorite school time activity is getting up to all kinds of mischief around the home, their second favorite is playing the part of students themselves. Each year I try to add a few new educational materials specifically for my littlest ones that promote both a sense of play and foster learning.

The new My Fun Set from SimplyFun has been a great addition for them!
It comes with three toddler-geared learning toys: My Fun Day calendar activity board, My Fun Shapes wooden block set, and the My Fun Buddy Book.

My Fun Day is a lovely wooden calendar set and is now part of our morning routine for school days. I try to start each school day with a little calendar work and this set has everything I need!

We’re able to discuss concepts like yesterday, today, and tomorrow while setting the markers to the correct day, date, and month each day. I love using the activity disks to help connect the concept of time on the clock to specific activities we do every day.

Time is such a tricky concept for kids to understand. What really is a month? An hour? An afternoon? Having ways to introduce these concepts to kids and help them learn how to break down time into meaningful segments and then connect those to the things they do every day goes a long way to helping them understand the world around them.

I’ll ask Felix (3) and Margot (5) to put the activities in an order that best represents their day from beginning to end. We’ll discuss what happens at different times of the day using the activity disks and the clock so that they can start to build a mental timeline and, for Felix, understand how these events relate to each other, while Margot works on mastering understanding this daily rhythm and relating it to the specific hours or blocks of hours in the day.

The My Fun Shape set comes in handy as a highly versatile activity my toddlers can engage with both with me and on their own.

Right now Greta is entering a stage of language explosion; she loves repeating everything we’re saying and having these large, vibrantly colored blocks in different shapes and colors gives the perfect opportunity to explore new words and begin associating them with something physical.

Felix may like this set most of all though because of the many different ways to play. I start with all the shapes in the bag and have him lay out all of the shape disks on the table or floor. Then he pulls out a shape one at a time, says the name of both the color and shape, then looks for its disk to place it on.

One of his favorite ways to play with the materials is what we call the “find the shape” game. I’ll choose two colors and put them and their corresponding disks on the table. Then we’ll choose one of the two color sets to put in the bag.

To play, he’ll select a shape from the table, pick it up, and feel all sides of the shape. Then he’ll reach a hand in the bag without looking and try to feel for that shape. If he gets it right, he can put it on its corresponding disk, if not, then it goes back in the bag and he can try again.

I like doing this because it helps him visualize the shape in his mind. If he knows that the star is pointy all around, then when he feels a block that’s smooth and round, he’ll know that that’s not the star, it feels like a circle, requiring the visualization of both shapes and comparing them.

And of course stacking the blocks nice and high is always fun too!

The last item in the My Fun Set is the My Fun Buddy Book. This is a soft, cuddly book with multiple flaps to flip so you can mix and match the animals.

It’s been a fun book for Greta who, at just barely 18 months, still loves these more sensory focused materials. She can play with it how she likes to play with things (read: throw it around, chew on it, and enthusiastically flip the flaps back and forth) and I or her siblings can point to the elements on the book and help add new words to her vocabulary.

I also like that the same shapes and colors from the shape set are in the book. Having that visual consistency will help cement these concepts of shapes and colors.

Each part of the My Fun set can be a great educational tool in your parenting toolkit. They’re not only fun for toddlers, but will help engage their eager to learn minds with these early learning concepts.