We all went through boredom at some point of our lives and the same stands true for your toddlers and young ones. Your young ones are at an age where they try to understand their surroundings and develop essential fine motor skills. Â Toddlers love making noises and exploring their surroundings and these activities will give them a jumpstart in their visual and gross motor skills development.
These are fun activities for toddlers at home and can be made from materials lying around the house, plus they’re fun!
15 Best Fun Activities For Toddlers To Keep Them Busy
These 15 indoor activities for toddlers at home turn afternoons into fun playtimes. Make sure your toddler doesn’t have a tendency to choke things or put objects into their mouth before you let them try these and you’ll be good to go. Check them out below.
1. Stuffed Animals And Toys In Bath Tubs
This one’s an absolute favourite among kids and ranks at the top of toddler activity ideas. Let them re-enact their favourite scenes and moments in the sea in the bathtub with rubber duckies and stuffed animals. Take it a step further by throwing in a couple of action figures and letting them really indulge in their imaginations before, during, or after bath times!
2. Finger Painting Fun
Get some flour, food colouring, and lukewarm water. Mix in the colourings with the mixture and let your kid have fun with these edible finger paints! Be aware that moulds grow after a week so you will need to replace the paints every one or two days. Â Make sure your toddler wears paint shirts since he/she may get creative and crazy, causing paints to spill over and make a fun-filled mess.
3. Toy Car Wash
This activity is fun-filled because not only does it teach your young one how to wash his toy cars but also about the importance of hygiene, in general. Take a few toy cars, soapy water, and fill the sink. Keep a bucket of water on the other side for rinsing after a good wash. Dry off with a towel and watch your kids smile.
You can do this activity with action figures and other toys too. Better yet, if you’ve got an inflatable pool, you can take this activity outdoors and convert it into one of the best fun-filled outdoor activities for toddlers.
4. Bathtub Paints
A fun and easy to do activity indoors is painting your bathtub during the winters with good ol’ bath paints? How to make the paints? Take some shaving cream in muffin tins and add food colouring to it. Give your kids a couple of paintbrushes and let them go wild painting their favourite bathtub!
5. Poke The Pom-Poms
Take a used oatmeal container and poke a hole through it. Give your kids some large pom-poms and let them poke those through the hole. Your kids will love this quiet activity at home plus they get to practice counting by keeping track of how many pom-poms they poke through the hole. You can take this activity a step further by letting them put in popcorn or smaller objects and encouraging them to practice counting how many objects they put in and describe what they are.
6. Spaghetti Noodles
Eating and playing go hand-in-hand with this fun little activity. Here’s how you do it. Cook some spaghetti and add a little bit of olive oil so the noodle strands don’t stick. Put them in separate containers and add food colouring to them. For the first activity, ask your kids to identify the different colours placed in separate plates and let them have fun mixing them together to make a gooey-gobbly delicious mess! For the second activity, get a few sheets of paper and draw few simple shapes on each (squares, circles, hexagons etc.)
Ask your child to take the noodle strands and trace the shapes with them to form new shapes. Creativity and sensory development jam-packed in one fun-filled activity!
7. Jello Playdough
Looking for a fun sensory activity that helps your kid build fine motor skills? Try making your homemade jello playdough and watch your child soar with creativity.
For this you will need –
- 1 cup flour
- 1 cup water
- 1/4 cup salt
- 2 tbsp oil
- 1 tbsp cream of tartar
- 1 pack of sugar-free jello
Blend all the above ingredients together and cook on low-flame atop a kitchen stove. Use a whisk to remove clumps and stir as often as you can, letting it cook for 5-7 minutes. Make sure you use a spatula to stir and once the dough forms into the shape of a ball, take it away from the stove. Let it cool for a minute or two and knead it on top of a cutting board. Store them in zip loc bags and let your kids explore by squishing, squeezing, turning, and morphing them into playful shapes resembling snakes, tortoises, and other animals. It’s a great activity for butter fingers and enhances wrist/arm strength and muscle coordination as well!
8. Contact Paper Art
For this activity, tape a sheet of contact paper and prepare a collection of pom-poms, buttons, beads, and pieces of cut-out pipe cleaners. Encourage your child to make art on top of the contact paper using these materials and create faces or familiar shapes. This one keeps kids occupied for a long time and we recommend you give suggestions for art making like writing their names, and recreating their favourite characters’ faces on it. They’ll stay focused for a couple hours at least, guaranteed!
9. Picture Puzzles
Give your child a collection of animal and picture puzzles. Go for the preferably chunky puzzles that are visually appealing since it helps them with their sensory development. Encourage your little on to solve them and become a junior detective early on!
10. Race Car Tracks
Use coloured tape to create a few race tracks on the floor. Give your little one a couple of toy race cars and watch him zip them away and indulge in fun times! This one definitely keeps tots busy for a few hours.
11. The Magnet Game
One of the best activities for toddlers at home during snack times that keeps them really busy. Give your toddler alphabet or picture magnets and encourage him to write letters and create stories with fridge magnets. Ask them to try writing sentences, letters, numbers, and try rearranging fridge magnets to describe new words.
12. Bubble Wraps
Give two or three big sheets of bubble wrap and ask your toddler to pop them. This is a noisy activity but keeps them busy and engaged for a few hours. Ask them to pop the bubbles with their hands and feet and try to pop them by walking on top of them. Encourage them to use race cars and toys to pop them. As you can see, the possibilities become limitless the minute you turn these wraps into a fun and engaging fine motor skills development activity!
13. Building Blocks
Get a toy pegboard or a set of building blocks and ask your child to build a tower. Make sure the pieces are of different colours and come in different shapes so that they get a challenge out of it. Ask them to build towers, houses, or even bridges with building blocks.
14. Creative Colouring
Get some window markers and ask them to colour on your windows. In addition to this, you may give your child their favourite character colouring books to keep them engaged and focused for hours. Teach them the basics of colour theory and show them how to mix colours and match them up with their favourite characters or surroundings. This improves their awareness of colours and promotes visual sensory development.
15. Sensory Balloons
Grab a couple of colourful balloons and use a funnel to fill them up with rice, almond kernels, kidney beans, and different pulses/grains. Use markers to draw funny faces on the balloons and seal them up. Now, ask your toddler to press or squish these sensory balloons and explore their sense of touch. Encourage them to guess what’s inside the balloons.
Once they guess correctly, give them a dustbin or waste-collection basket and ask them to throw those balloons in from a distance. Toddlers love throwing things and this activity definitely keeps them busy. The squishing and squeezing develops their hand strength and builds fine motor skills in the process.
You don’t need to break a bank in order to try out these play activities for toddlers at home. If you’re especially busy, then these are great for keeping your toddlers busy in the house. This lets you work in peace and let them enjoy themselves for hours without any harm or hassle.
