Re: Age appropriate activities and games
These kinds of puzzles are great for fine motor skills for young children.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with a child as young as 18 months just flicking through the pictures of a book, they are too young to want to sit and listen to a story, verbal stories would be just fine at that age. The fact that they are touching and interacting with a book is enough for the time being.
A few ideas/activities, I know im not a mummy but I have taught up to 45 3 year old children in one day and I defy anybody who can cope with that 
Singing – songs about anything, colours, numbers, letters, shapes, food, animals, just make songs up!
Talking – talk about EVERYTHING, even when you are just putting them in the car seat or pushchair, say what you’re doing, they are listening. A child needs to see a word 60+ times in order to read it, so I would say a children needs to hear a word quite a few times in order to say it too.
Hardboard and material books are a great investment, they wont tear if baby decides to hoye them in their mouth and they are so visually appealing with different textures and bright colours.
I always tend to have a visual object to go with each story I have so that the child has something to see and touch to make the story more real. You can buy tons of stuffed animals in any £/$ shop. Standard ones are a teddy bear, a wolf (so many wolf stories!), a fish (The rainbow fish..awww), a mouse (The gruffalo), an elephant (Elmer), even a bunch of random jungle/farm animals would do for when you are making up your own stories.
Puppets and masks are good for when your child want to make their own stories too, you can even make them at home using felt or old socks, or wooden lolly sticks.
Early mark making I would say needs to start with playdough, the more opportunities they have to manipulate playdough the better it is for their pencil or any writing instrument grip. I recently learn this ‘dough disco’ technique, which sounds very daft but OH SO MUCH FUN! You put on some disco music and ‘dance’ with the play dough in your hands, like rolling it into a ball, a snake, patting it, using each finger to poke into it, like tommy thumb’s turn to dance, now peter pointer’s turn to dance, its really silly but a lot of fun and your child will be using up the muscles required for when they start writing.
Big sheets of paper or old wallpaper and marker pens, just doing sqiggly lines is fine for children from 2-3.
Chalk washes off so easily from the pavement – you can get big chalks too, I got mine from the £ shop.
Big paint brushes in a bucket of water to ‘write’ and ‘draw’ on the walls outside of the house.
Finger/hand/feet painting is awesome. Messy, but if you tape the paper on the floor outside and organise it properly it doesn’t need to be as painful as it sounds.
Counting steps, I do giant steps, baby steps, dinosour steps, princess steps just to make it more appealing.
Sorting objects are great, you can get these little plastic animals already in tubs and sort them in to sizes, colours, types of animals.
Hiding objects into slightly deep trays of hair gel and mouse is great! I used to hide letters of a childs name in hair gel and she had to find the letters in 2 mins (I used a sand timer to time her) and then she would have to arrange her name in order. I then moved on to different coloured shapes to teach her shapes and colours at the same time. You can do this with sand and water too, put a little food dye in the water to make it more appealing.
Bubbles are standard as they are just great fun
Oh and I love Slinkys.
I can’t think of any more at the moment but when I do I shall try and post.
