How I Taught My Toddler Shapes & Colors

I am not getting paid to write this, first of all - but I felt compelled to post this because I feel so strongly about these books:

The way I have been teaching my toddler his shapes, colors, numbers and letters is through a book collection called "My Books" from Southwestern Publishing. There are four books in the series - shapes, colors, numbers and words. The books have bright colors, fun illustrations and are in both English and Spanish for all the words. The books also include large tear-out posters in the back of the different elements from the books.

My son absolutely LOVES these books. We look at them multiple times as day. He is 21 months and knows his shapes, knows about half his colors and he also can identify all the single-digit numbers and half the alphabet. I'm not a trained child development expert - just a mom of five - but to me, that's pretty early and I credit these books.

I took the posters to FedEx/Kinkos and had them laminated, which was not cheap but SO worth it because he loves looking at the posters too. I say "Where's the stars?" and he'll point to all three places on the poster that has stars.

Now here's the kicker: Southwestern is actually a publishing company that focuses solely on helping college students make money from door-to-door sales. They do not sell on-line! Here's the contact form so if you are interested, you can find out when the Southwestern sales people will be in your neighborhood. They have a finely-honed sales pitch that could be off-putting if you hate being "sold" but if you can appreciate the quality products they're hawking (and there are many for all levels of child) and that you are helping a college student build their sales business and make money for the summer, then you'll be very happy with the result.

I can tell you we are.