Tag: my reviews

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My Review On “Busy Toddler’s Guide To Actual Parenting”

I recently bought the book Busy Toddler’s Guide To Actual Parenting and want to share my honest review with you. If you’re thinking about purchasing her Playing Preschool guide, you can see my review here.

Please keep in mind that this review is not sponsored or endorsed in any way, these are all my own thoughts and opinions. 

Overall: This is a great parenting book! I feel like Suzy and I are old friends in another life, we are so similar! So that did sway my opinion in ways. However, I loved that she began the book with a preface that she didn’t really like parenting books, so she wrote one of her own! And did it beautifully by the way. The overall feel of her book is that parenting is hard and comes with a lot of challenges, but these challenges are manageable and she has tips to share to get us all through them. 

Things that particularly stood out to me:

*The pictures she includes of her family and kids, which make the whole book feel more relatable. It’s not as much a “preachy” book full of “I-know-more-than-you” type of wording, it’s full of her real-life experiences and how she managed as a mom. 

*She advertises it as an “activity” book as well because she includes 50+ activities to do with kids. I was worried this wouldn’t be applicable or helpful for me because I could just follow her Instagram account. Or I didn’t want to read one big list of activities and be overwhelmed by different things to do with my kids, making it not actually helpful. 

However, this wasn’t the case! They are strategically placed throughout the book where they made sense and lined out exactly what you need, how to do it, and even a picture to show the setup! For example, after a whole chapter on taby’s (not quite a baby anymore, not quite a toddler yet), she finished the chapter with a section of taby activities. 

They aren’t activities you will be doing right at that moment, obviously. But it does make it easier to flip through quickly and pull up an activity to do with your kids, and they are especially easy to find since there are pictures of where the activities are! 

*There is a whole chapter on tantrums that completely changed the dynamic of our home. It was so good! 

*A lot of her ideas were just little steps to get you through parenting. There wasn’t anything huge you needed to understand or accomplish, she just teaches simple ideas like, “teach your child to use a code word when they are struggling to avoid tantrums.” 

As far as cons go, I honestly could not find any. It is organized well, the activities are doable as a parent, and the whole book feels very relatable. The only minuscule thing I might be able to think of is that it’s very directed at parenting young kids, and won’t help as in-depth with parenting pre-teens/teenagers. However, it does really niche down the book to make it very applicable instead of having a broader perspective. 

Susie Allison wrote a great book, one I would recommend to any parent in the early stages of parenting. I have gifted this book to many friends that all agree, it is a great parenting book! 

If you’ve read it, what do you think about it? 

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My Review On Playing Preschool

A few months back I purchased Busy Toddler’s Playing Preschool book to do preschool with my daughter and a little neighbor friend. I wrote a little about the experience here. After a few months of working through the book, I want to write a review to help you decide if it’s the right decision for you. Before I begin, read more about what Playing Preschool entails here.

Pros: 

Lessons are easy to read and organized. Whether you’re an educator or not, there is plenty of information and resources to give you the most success possible. 

We had to take a few weeks off while I worked from home, but it was easy to pick back up again and get started. The lessons are evergreen and can be done at any time of the year. 

Most of the materials were found at home, but mostly because we’ve been doing toddler based activities for a year now. Even if you don’t have all of the materials at home, it’s a worthwhile investment because they are cheap and useful! I don’t know about you, but we go through a pack of construction paper really fast over here! 

Some weeks required more materials such as the cooking unit because we needed a lot of food, but again, nothing crazy expensive and worth the money for the outcome. I went through the supply list of every unit before we got started and made an Amazon Wishlist and shared it with our family members that often like to buy my kid’s gifts so that they would know the books and tools that would be extra useful to us right now! 

The activities do not take a lot of time to set up. I don’t think I ever spent more than two minutes gathering supplies and setting up an activity for the lessons. They are quick and practical! 

The lessons truly are playing. There are no worksheets to print out! It’s all activities to set up for your preschool to explore numbers and letters. There’s a lot of paint and a lot of play! A method I can get behind! 

Cons: 

I loved that each unit had a great book list that really worked hand in hand with each day, but we started Playing Preschool the same time quarantine began, meaning our library was closed! Without the resource of the library, it was so hard to find the specific books she recommended. I did my best to find substitutes (although her suggestions truly are the best books to use). I also tried the free trial of Vooks, but not a single book on the list was found there! You can read my Vooks review here. 

Another solution I found was to buy a few books on thirftbooks.com, they had great prices and free shipping after a certain amount spent! I couldn’t pass up an opportunity at buying new books! We also searched Kindle on Amazon for any free or cheap purchases. Those books obviously aren’t the same as holding a real book, but it did the job! 

The rest I put on my Amazon wishlist for our family members and we received many that way. I also called upon good friends and neighbors to borrow their books. With all efforts combined, I was able to get together all of our books! With access to a public library, this process would not be as difficult as it was for me, but I wanted to share my ideas for others who also may not have access to a library as well. 

The final downside is more on me than on the curriculum itself. I would feel like the entire unit was a failure if we skipped a day or even a single activity. I wanted to get everything in to make sure she understood the concepts being taught. In the introduction of Playing Preschool, Susie the creator of the curriculum explicitly says you do not have to do every activity and it does not have to all be done in one sitting. She suggestions spreading it out throughout the day or splitting it up into two sections if accomplishing everything in one sitting is too much for your preschooler. My type-A personality shone through a lot when I saw each activity as a checklist feeling like I needed to mark everything off. You do not need to do this to have success in the program. 

Overall, I truly have loved Playing Preschool and use it often with my daughter. Even if we are on a break from doing preschool, I can still pull it out and find one or two activities for her to do while I cook dinner or clean the house. It’s great exposure to letters and numbers. My 2.5-year-old has very little interest in her letters and even after a few weeks of playing preschool she can’t name a single letter or letter sound, but she’s still gaining that exposure and teaching her to have a love for learning and reading. Playing Preschool for the win! 

A few of our Playing Preschool experiences!

Have you done the Playing Preschool curriculum? Leave your pros and cons in the comments for others to see! 

Cover photo from busytoddler.com