The battle is over.

The battle for your dinner prep time is over my friends. That is, if you have Battleship.

The Schmeese loves lining things up and he is really into small little things. I looked through our game shelves the other day and brought up Battleship. I sat down at the kitchen table with Schmeese and showed him how to put all the little pieces in the holes.

It is KEY that you sit down with your child and spend a good ten minutes or so doing something like this WITH your child or else you will have red and white battleship bombs all over your kitchen floor. You can't expect them to just figure it out and play neatly. Well, at least not with mine anyway.

Expect them to be frustrated at first. Schmeese really struggled initially because he didn't understand why some wouldn't go in. I helped to see that they only went in one direction. It was cute to watch his little mind problem solve and work it out. That has to be one of my favorite things about teaching. You can just see and hear the gears in their mind turning.

They are so proud of themselves once they can do it all by themselves.

Schmeese "played" Battleship for a good twenty minutes by himself (after I invested the initial ten) while I prepared dinner. He has done that for about four days in a row now.
I also got a tin of dominoes out and he spent time lining them up, standing them on end and knocking them down.

Variations: Check your game cupboards and see what you come up with. Although toddlers are too young to play most of the games you may be surprised what you come up with. I can see Schmeese putting checkers on all the checkerboard squares or lining up chess pieces. What about cubed Boggle letters? I can def see potential in Boggle too.

Any other ideas?

Cost: free (assuming you have the games)