TV Free Friday: How Kids Can Use Holiday Catalogs

As the holidays approach, I notice that our mailbox is filled each day with more and more holiday catalogs. No matter how many you are getting, you may be wondering what I am wondering. What am I to do with all of these? Do I take the time to flip through them? Do I just pop them right into the recycling bin?

Do you get this many or more each day in November and December?

This is where having a 2 year-old comes in handy. One of our routines each weekday is to wait for the mailman to deliver the mail and then sit on the foyer floor and sort through it. We see what is junk, what needs to be filed in the office and what catalogs have arrived.

One of the activities that we have created on rainy days has been to curl up with the catalogs and read them. Toy catalogs like Magic Cabin or decorating catalogs like Pottery Barn are great resources for talking about colors, objects, bigger vs. smaller, animals, and letters and numbers. I’m fortunate that Tomato loves to do this and could and has spent an hour doing this. She also loves when we get the new Wegmans recipe book and we pretend to “eat” our way through the magazine as well as offer the food to all of her stuffed animals. It’s great imaginative playtime!!

As winter approaches and the daylight gets shorter and the temperatures lower, we are inside more than we are in the summer. So, finding new things to do with those catalogs was this week’s TV Free challenge. Tomato has reached a point as a 2 year-old that she loves to categorize things. So, I figured it was time to grab a composition book and start her first collage.

Our candles collage page (Thank you Plow & Hearth!)

Working on her glue stick skills

I decided that we could take advantage of her new found preschool love of the glue stick and I could cut items out that she chose and she could put the glue on. It helps her with making choices, identifying objects and her small motor skills. I wrote the name of the collection at the top of the page and gave her four pages for each collection before writing up another.

Patting down her picture on the dogs page

She is working on putting the item on the page and gently patting it down to secure it. This has been a goldmine for us this week. It’s one of the first things she asks to do when we come down in the morning, and my mom brought even more catalogs to explore for when she helps to watch her. We will probably extend the activity with some math by counting how many of each item we have on each page and record it in the corner. It’s definitely a winner on my end for developmental skills and on Tomato’s end for fun and exploration. Let me know if you try it out with your little ones!!