Alicia Bayer
Give her a wooden spoon and an assortment of small pots to bang. Try giving her other instruments that make slightly different noises too, such as metal and plastic spoons.
Tape down some waxed paper and give him some pudding to finger paint with. Want it healthier? Tint some yogurt pink with beet juice or yellow with turmeric, or just use a dollop of any dark or brightly colored baby food.
Give her a bowl of O cereal, a small spoon and an empty bowl. Show her how to scoop from one bowl and fill the other. She can snack as she goes! You can also give her a fuzzy pipe cleaner and show her how to push the cereal onto it.
Alternately, give her some uncooked spaghetti to poke through the holes. It's also great fun to break spaghetti!
Give him some homemade playdough and some things to poke and pound it with. My little guy likes to stab it with chopsticks. Every few minutes I make it into a bunch of new shapes like worms, bricks, balls and bowls to give him a new way to play with it.
Put some colored water in an ice cube tray and give him a medicine dropper. He can squeeze the colored water and transfer it to other containers to make new colors. You can also put down a coffee filter to drop the colored water onto and make designs. This activity captivates many toddlers and improves their small motor skills.
It sounds like parental sacrilege, but a box of cheap bandaids will buy you an awful lot of minutes. It's cheaper than stickers and somehow far cooler in most toddler minds. You may want to get a different brand than usual, so it's clear that regular bandaids aren't for playing.
Garage sale stickers are also great fun and much more affordable than most children's stickers. Give her a whole page of big bright stickers and a piece of paper to stick them to.
Older toddlers can experiment with using safety scissors to cut a variety of materials-- yarn, paper, tissue paper, tin foil, a leaf, etc.
Fill an old purse with a variety of baby-safe items and let him explore it. Some ideas are a mirrored compact to open, an empty change purse, a small notebook, wood or plastic baby keys (real keys often contain lead), a soft ball, etc. The more zippers and pockets the purse has, the better.
Wash out some yogurt, sour cream or cottage cheese containers and show her how to stack and nestle them. When she's tired of that, put the lids on them and put different things in each-- lots of safe cereal in one, a pacifier or other large item in one, and so on. Show her how they each make a different sound. Carefully cut a hole in one lid and show her how to drop cereal into it to extend the fun even more.
This time of year in Minnesota, we have oodles of another perfect toddler toy, too -- snow! Scoop up a pan of it and give your little one instruments like tiny spoons, chopsticks and little toys to use with it. You can also save dried out markers to color the snow. It's a great way to get a second life out of them.
What are your favorite busy activities for little ones?
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