Early Years Resources That Help Educate Kids

Early Years Resources That Help Educate Kids – A Review

As a qualified Early years teacher, I’ve always loved buying, making and finding new resources and products that can be used in a fun way to help children learn. In fact, I love to collect educational items that can be used to help little ones to improve basic counting and literacy skills. Today I am sharing five early years resources from WordUnited that do exactly that!

What Are Manipulatives in Early Childhood Education?

A manipulative is a learning tool that can be used to get the attention of a preschooler to help keep them engaged enough to learn basic skills such as counting, letter or colour recognition.

Learning through manipulative play requires a child to use objects to match, build, weight, sort and order and this in turn builds a foundation for the very basic skills needed to learn.

Examples of Manipulatives in Preschool

You can use manipulatives both in the preschool setting, at Nursery or in the home. I love to have educational activities available in my home for when we have little visitors and I’m currently creating my own set of games which is a fun an exciting project.

To help me create some fun learning games, I was able to order some key items from WordUnited, a fantastic online store that sells educational products and toys which I love.

You may have seen our telescope review for older kids from the same store?

Some examples of manipulatives are:

• Coloured wooden blocks
• Dice and cubes
• Base ten blocks
• Two-sided counters.
• Letters
• Weighted creatures

Viga Wooden Magnetic Letters

The first item I ordered was some viga wooden magnetic letters. These are great both at nursery and at home. You can place these on a fridge, use them for letter matching activities and for teaching the sounds and names of the alphabet.

Jumbo Tweezers Preschool Learning Resource

Jumbo tweezers are super cool. Not only do they look fun, they encourage children to practice gripping and develop early fine motor skills. You can use jumbo tweezers to match items for example in this super cute pom pom color matching game which I created over on Craft Play Learn!

The Jumbo tweezers from WordUnited come in a set of 12 and are brightly coloured which makes them super enticing to the little ones.

Sea Animal Counters

These really cute Edx Education Aquatic counters are fun tools to use for colour sorting, teaching about sea animals and teaching counting skills. I have so may ideas for using these sea animal counters and cannot wait to get designing some fun printables for my nieces and nephews to use.

Preschool Dinosaur Counters

Who doesn’t love Dinosaurs? Seriously! They have been a huge part of my life since I was little. Dinosaurs are interesting and fun for both boys and girls and these cute colourful dinosaur counters can be put to a lot of educational use.

The Dinosaurs come in 6 colours and there are eight different types.

• Stegosaurus,
• Brontosaurus,
• Ankylosaurus,
• Triceratops,
• Tyrannosaurus Rex,
• Spinosaurus,
• Pterodactyl,
• Parasaurolophus.

You can use these fun dinosaur manipulatives for counting, sorting, creating patterns and basic maths such as addition and subtraction. I love these dinosaur early years resources and am excited to put them to use in the coming weeks.

Weighted Counting Bears

Have you ever been in a preschool class that doesn’t have weighted bears? I love weighted bear shaped counters. They are fun colourful and attractive to preschool aged kids and can be used in so many ways.

The weighted bears pack from WordUnited contains 96 backpack bears that come in six colours and in 3 different sizes and weights.

These bears are great early years resources, can be used to teach about measurement but are versatile enough to be used for counting, colour sorting, helping with fine motor skills and imaginative play.

I really do love the quality if these weighted counting bears and they are a really good price too! Very affordable.

Dice

Last but not least I ordered a set of 100 dice. You can never have enough dice in a preschool or Nursery setting and we are always in need of them at home too.

I purchased a set of 100 dot dice which come in the colours red, blue, green, yellow and white. These dice are great for hands on activities, maths, sorting, counting and much more. They can be used in so many ways and come with a great storage jar too!

I plan to use these dice to create some fun and interesting basic maths games for the little ones to enjoy.

Manipulatives as Early Years Resources

Manipulatives are fantastic and the quality of these products and tools are really high. I am super impressed and excited to start using these items in the coming days and weeks.

Thanks WordUnited for gifting these products. I am sure they will help some little learners along their child developmental journey.