Image of Emily
By Emily

December 4th, 2012

I often babysit my 2 year old nephew Drew at my dad’s house. He has a good sized yard as well as a small cluster of farm animals – cows, chickens, ducks, rabbits, etc. His house itself is very small though. During the summer and nice days in spring and fall we basically spend the entire day outside and have a blast. Keeping a 2 year old entertained in a tiny house in the middle of winter is much trickier.

DaniJo Designs is an Etsy shop that makes Felt boards and accessories that have proven to be a fun way to keep the little guy entertained and fairly quiet while inside. We were sent a handful of sets from Danijo Designs. The first set was a transportation set that includes a car, semi, train, bus, etc. The second set was an animal set that has a hippo, flamingo, alligator, tiger, giraffe, etc. We also received a capital alphabet set (there is also a lowercase set available) and a numbers set.

Drew has enjoyed lining up the cars and just playing pretend with them and the same thing with the animals. He knew most of the animals but wasn’t familiar with the flamingo so it’s been a way for me to help introduce him to that. For the letters and numbers, we’ve primarily used them for color recognition. Drew knows the color orange really well but is wishy washy on the rest. We’ve used the letters and numbers to play “find it” type games where I’ll ask him to find me an orange letter so he will. Other times I will take away most of the letters but make three different piles of 3 colors and then hand him a number or letter that is the same color as one of the piles and ask him if he knows where it goes, etc.

“orange!”

My 4 year old nephew was over one day and on his own just started telling me that this was letter T, and this was E, etc. He picked out the letters of his name for me as well. His 6 year old brother used the letters to write some words that he knew how to spell. On a different day my 9 year old sister (Jorden) was over and had gotten kind of bored so she opened up the bags of letters and put them in ABC order and then spelled a few words as well. I thought it was neat to see how they could hold the interest for kids across such a big age range.

In addition to felt sets like we received, DaniJo also makes felt board cases that would be great for traveling or for using felt pieces in the car.

Want to keep up with DaniJo Designs? Connect with the Facebook page.

Buy it: To purchase from Danijo Designs visit the Etsy Shop.

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