Toodler Kids

Free Easter Lacing Cards

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Lacing is a great activity for young children to help develop fine motor skills, concentration, and hand-eye coordination. Try it out with these 3 Easter themed lacing cards!

Print the cards out, then laminate them and cut out the picture along the dashed lines. (If you don't have a laminator you could glue them to a thin cardboard like a cereal box). Then use a hole puncher to punch holes where indicated. For young children I suggest starting with the egg or the chick as those are easier. For older children you can add challenge by punching extra holes in between the holes that are already there.

Give your child a shoe lace, or a piece of yarn that is reinforced by tape at the end. Tip: to make it easier you can add a bigger piece of tape at the end, as big as 1 or 2 inches to form the lacing "needle". Enjoy!

Download your Free Easter Lacing Cards!

Free Easter Playdough Mats

There is something so irresistibly fun about playdough. Try out these Easter Playdough Mats for some simple activities that your kids will love! Great for creativity, logic, fine motor skills and color recognition. Just print and laminate and your child can use them again and again.

This post contains affiliate links for your convenience.

These FREE Easter Playdough mats include 6 designs featuring an Easter bunny, Easter eggs, basket and bunny maze. Our favorite way to use playdough mats is to laminate them, so they can be reused. This is the laminator that I have used for years and highly recommend.

For more playdough mats, see our Summer, Fall, Winter and Christmas mats!

Click Here to Download your FREE Easter Playdough Mats

Click Here to browse through ALL of our FREE Easter printables, or click the image below:

DIY Recycled Raisin Box Puzzle

You know those little raisin boxes that kids love to hold and eat out of? Instead of throwing them away, let's reuse them and turn them into puzzles! I created a cute 12 piece farm puzzle that you can use. All you need is 12 raisin boxes, scissors and glue. This is a great project for Earth Day or for any day!

You can use any brand of raisins, the standard size boxes, which are either 1 oz or 1.5 oz. They are the same size in length and width, just different thickness.

This is the brand I used, but like I said, you can use any brand, for example those red Sun Maid boxes are fine.

Once you have 12 boxes you can just print and cut the puzzle and glue each piece to the boxes.

And that's it! Wasn't that easy? Now if you want, you could use Velcro on the sides of the boxes to hold it together as your child completes the puzzle, but it's not necessary at all.

As an eco-friendly alternative to the free printable, you could find a picture in a magazine or newspaper and use that for the puzzle!

Download your Raisin Box Puzzle Here

Recycling Sorting Free Printable

Celebrate Earth Day and teach your kids about recycling with this free printable sorting activity!

Instead of categorizing the recyclables by material, ie. plastic, glass, metal, etc, I felt it would be simpler for a young child to understand recycling in terms of everyday objects that they are already familiar with: bottles, paper, cans & boxes. They will begin to see these items as things that can be recycled.

This activity comes with 2 levels of difficulty. For toddlers and very young children, the items to be sorted are all the same as the sample picture, and the child sorts by matching. For preschoolers or older kids, the items in each category are different and the child has to first determine what each item is and then what category it belongs in.

I recommend that you laminate and use Velcro for this activity. However, this can also be done using 4 baskets or containers and the child sorts the pictures into the correct container.

Click Here to Download your Free Printable Recycling Sorting Activity!

Free Earth Day Pack for Toddlers & PreK

Celebrate Earth Day with your toddlers and preschoolers with this fun set of 16 printable activities featuring letter sounds, pre-writing, word tracing, puzzles, do-a-dot, lacing, counting, number recognition, patterns, visual discrimination matching, and more!

Click Here to Download your FREE Earth Day Pack Here!

For more Earth Day printable activities, see the following posts:

Recycling Sorting

Earth Q-Tip Painting

Earth Day Alphabet & Number Puzzles

Spanish Language 3 Part Cards

These Montessori-inspired Spanish Language 3-Part Vocabulary Cards can be used with both readers and non-readers. The set includes numbers 1-10, colors, 18 animals including pets, farm and zoo, body parts and vehicles.

Spanish is an important second language to learn in the U.S. as there are over 38 million speakers and quickly growing. There are more Spanish speakers in the United States than there are speakers of Chinese, French, German, Italian, Hawaiian and Native American languages combined. Wow! And I know first-hand that more and more employers are hiring bilingual employees who can communicate with Spanish-speaking clients.

How to Use 3-Part Cards:

These are called 3-Part cards because one card is the control card, which has a picture and word, while the other cards are just the picture and just the word. Print 2 copies of each card, one copy is for cutting out the control cards, while the other copy is for cutting out the picture and word cards. Laminate or glue to cardstock for durability.

For Non-Readers

Here are some ways to use the cards for toddlers & non-readers:

1. Print one copy of the cards - the control card. Lay down one card at a time and say in a clear voice what it is called. You can say it in both English and Spanish, or just Spanish, whatever you choose.

2. Picture Matching - Print a second copy and cut out the picture cards. Lay down the control cards and have the child match the picture cards to the control cards.

3. Sight Word Matching - Cut out the label cards and have the child match the labels to the control cards by sight.

3. Object Matching - If you have objects such as plastic animals, toy vehicles or different colored objects to match the pictures, let the child match the objects to the pictures.

4. Memory Game - Print 2 copies of each picture, lay them face down and play a classic memory game.

For Readers

1. Matching Word to Picture - Lay down the picture cards without labels and have the child match the labels to the picture. The child can check their work by looking at the control cards.

2. Matching Picture to Word - Lay down just the label cards without pictures and have the child match the picture to the word. The child can check their work by looking at the control cards.

If you have any other ideas on how to use the cards leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Click here to Download your Spanish Language 3-Part Vocabulary Cards

Easy Mother's Day Pop-Up Card

Every time I open up a card or book and see that it has pop-ups, I feel a little happier. And Mother's Day is all about making moms happy. So here is a little tutorial on how to make an easy pop-up card with your toddler or preschooler - it really is easier than you think! This is a nice craft that even Daddies can do with their kids (hint hint). I also included some (optional) printable clipart that you can use to finish off the card, but you can easily use other craft supplies like tissue paper, stickers, etc. Just remember that whatever is inside the card should be relatively thin so that it can actually close.

Step 1:

Have your child create 2 paintings on a heavyweight type of paper. Then let the paintings dry completely.

Step 2:

Choose which painting will be seen on the outside of the card - fold in half with the painted part on the outside. (ours was the purple one) The other painting will be on the inside of the card - fold in half with the painted part on the inside. (ours was the greenish one) You now have 2 cards. You will place one inside the other as I show in the picture, but not yet - first we have to make the pop-outs in the middle.

Step 3:

Take the "inside" painting (the greenish one) and make 4 short cuts (about 1/3 of the width of the paper) along the folded edge. I drew 4 lines on the picture below to show you more clearly.

Then press in the little strips of paper so that they "pop" out from the inside of the card. Fold along the edges of the pop-out parts so that they retain their shape. You now have 2 pop-out parts but if you prefer you can just do 1 large pop-out in the middle by making 2 cuts instead of 4.

Step 4:

Put glue on the non-painted sides of the 2 cards and glue them together. Make sure you put a lot of glue around the edges and corners. You can then close the card and set it underneath a pile of books for 30 minutes to make sure it stays glued together nicely.

And that's it! We now have a pop-up card! Keep reading for the decorating instructions.

Step 5: Decorate!

Have your child decorate the outside of the card with whatever you have on hand, stickers, glitter, or you can use some of the free clipart I have. We decided to keep it simple and just glue a little heart that says "mom".

Step 6: Now that the outside is decorated we can glue the things that we want to pop-up on the inside. We chose two flowers from my clipart and glued them to the pieces that pop out.

Then we cut slits in the "grass" and glued it to the bottom of the flowers.

We called it "finished" after this because I really didn't want to cover too much of her beautiful paintings. If your child can write, they can use a sharpie or marker to write on top of the painting. Here is our finished card - inside and outside.