Teaching my children their ABCs, numbers, colors, and shapes is always at the top of my daily to-do list.

Help your toddler match the colored blocks with the correct color on the cup.

But life always has other plans. There’s housework, and errands, laundry, and the poopy diapers that leave a trail of poop that I don’t see until an hour later, which requires a bath (sometimes for me and the toddler), disinfecting the trail of poop and any affected areas, snack time, lunch time, and nap time.

And no, we cannot interrupt nap time.

So I’m learning to keep our educational activities really simple, without plopping them down in front of the laptop to watch YouTube.

To help my two-year-old learn her colors and quantities, I used these inexpensive foam counting blocks I found on Amazon. I use construction paper to label the cups various colors and together, and I helped her put the right color blocks into the cups until she figured out how to recognize the colors and do it on her own. Simple enough?

 This next activity is courtesy of some simple pattern blocks that I also found on Amazon here. You can buy these or print them out from several different homeschooling websites on my Pinterest page. On my home printer, I made copies of these pattern block templates from a website called Confessions of a Homeschooler.

Then, you only need to sit down with the toddler and match the pattern blocks up the paper templates. It’s a simple activity that teaches children shapes, colors, and helps them recognize patterns.

My toddler learns colors, shapes and patterns using pattern blocks and templates I printed out.

After a few minutes my toddler could do it by herself, so I will print out more difficult templates next time.