Looking for an easy way to teach your toddler or preschooler their phone number? Do I have the simplest and easiest tip for you! And guess what, YOU really don’t have to do much! No ink to waste on printables, no sing song games (even though I attempted that before). Just use what they love to help them.
My son is really smart (says every mom), he even taught himself how to read by the time he was 3 with VERY LITTLE effort from us (I’ll share that tip a little later). We were blessed to be able to keep him home for the first year of his life and after that he always attended a home daycare. We made the conscious choice to leave him with someone we trusted. However, very little learning happened there, which was the downside.
When we finally allowed him to go to preschool, they had homework every night. EVERY FREAKIN NIGHT! One of the things he had to learn was his phone number and address. I first tried to get him to memorize it by learning a song… let’s just say singing is not one of his strong suits. We tried games… nope. Then, I adjusted. I had to let him learn by presenting it to him in a way that would make him WANT to learn it.
So what did I do? I promise, it’s so simple that I can’t believe I’m doing a post on it.
My son (and many other kids) LOVE CELLPHONES. Mine can do any and everything on it. I swear, I only see it when he brings it to me and says “Mommy, your phone died. You gotta charge it.” Well, I turned his love of my cellphone into a learning opportunity.
The one simple trick I did to get him to learn his phone number is to change my cellphone lockscreen password to our phone number. TADAAAAA! If he wanted to play on my phone, he would have to input our phone number. He would ask a few times and he would look over my shoulder… but BY THE END OF THE DAY he learned the phone number. As he would input it, I would make him say it out loud.
Simple, right?! We even used this trick to teach him our address and zip code.
If you try this method, let me know how it worked for you. Or if you tried different methods, feel free to share!