It is a common fact that our babies are the most active human beings at an early age. This is why it is extremely important to always fill in the day with outdoor and indoor activities for babies and toddlers. They need to run, jump and be everywhere at the same time. The ability to concentrate on one task gradually increases as your child grows. This is why the younger he is, the easier it is to deal with his tantrums.
A normal attention span is three to five minutes per year of a child’s age. Therefore, a 2-year-old should be able to concentrate on a particular task for at least 6 minutes, but it is also purely individual. While your toddler may enjoy drawing for ten minutes, he can spend less than one minute solving the puzzle. As a parent, you shall introduce various indoor activities for kids and fun things to do with family at home. Let your baby try everything and concentrate more on something he likes doing best.
We have prepared a special article introducing various games and indoor activities for toddlers and babies that you can do with your child while staying at home. Keep your children entertained during Coronavirus lockdown.
- Things to do with kids at home during Coronavirus lockdown
- 1. Sing nursery rhymes songs
- 2. Read books
- 3. Dance and get crazy
- 4. Solve the puzzles
- 5. Play with a magic cube – A shape sorter
- 6. Play with animals making up the story
- 7. Do the washing
- 8. Water activities
- 9. Do the cooking
- 10. Placing things in the bottle
- 11. Painting
- 12. Shapes sorting suncatcher
- 13. Make a rainbow
- 14. Building with Blocks. Nesting and stacking colorful blocks
- 15. Act!
Things to do with kids at home during Coronavirus lockdown
1. Sing nursery rhymes songs
Let’s start with the simplest and yet extremely important activity. Among all fun activities for kids at home, there is nothing more important than sing songs, tell rhymes, read books and dance. The first three are good indicators of how fast your child starts to speak. Through rhymes, kids learn to express themselves.
As a child reaches two years of age, he absorbs every single word like a sponge. Some of the things he can say may absolutely surprise you. This is when you realize you are heard and seen all the time.
Nursery rhymes songs are also good to learn various signs, gestures, and actions.
Listen to this playlist specially designed for your kids!
Have more song ideas, share with us in the comments below!
2. Read books
Another important activity that can take a lot of time is reading books. It is a perfect way to learn languages and make stories up along the way.
Important: Amazon has recently announced FREE Audible Stories for kids until schools are closed. Now kids from all over the globe can stream an incredible collection of stories across six different languages. You can stream them on your desktop, laptop, phone or tablet.
For paperback, we highly recommend this collection of absolutely amazing books.
3. Dance and get crazy
Indoor gross motor and physical activities are crucial for your child’s development too. The easiest way to wear your toddler out is to let him dance and run around.
There are tons of physical activities that can be done at home even with little or no space at home, here are some ideas:
Run and jump around.
Jump from the step stool or sofa.
Make imaginary barriers and let your toddler jump over or run around.
Use household items, I recommend using puzzles or mats. Put them on the floor and imagine that the floor is the Amazon river where crocodiles, piranhas, and anacondas live. Tell your toddler to jump on these mats avoiding falling into the water and ran away from the sea creatures. Also, orthopedics mats are fantastic and highly recommended in order to strengthen your toddler’s knee caps and calves, especially if you see he gives you the signs of flat feet.
Fly around the house and ride on daddy’s back and shoulders.
Practice yoga or simple exercise during your workout.
Youtube has a lot of content.
Note: The above-mentioned activities must be performed under a parent’s supervision.
4. Solve the puzzles
Since we have mentioned the puzzles, this is the game that your child may be interested in. Puzzles can be different, our favorite is the floor mats or the one where we can count animals and learn numbers. It is your choice!
5. Play with a magic cube – A shape sorter
One of our favorite activities is playing with shape-sorter cubes. It develops your kid’s motor skills and is a fun way to learn colors and shapes. We also build blocks out of it.
Alternatively, make your own cube with questions and tasks, for example, fly like a parrot, hop like a frog; you can ask such things like what is your favorite color? How does the cow sound? What is your favorite song?
Or if you do not wish to make a perfectly geometric cube, I suggest making cards with tasks.
At home, we have got a Tumbling Tower Block game or “Jenga” that we bought for St. Valentine’s Day for fun. It is pink and has all those relationship-related questions. Since our son can’t read yet, I let him build blocks and think of any interesting question or task when he picks one of them. So, go ahead! Use your imagination!
6. Play with animals making up the story
This game is perfect for little minds. I noticed at the age of two or three kids’ imagination goes wild. If you have got different animals at home: wild or farm animals, insects, birds, sea life, it is always a great idea to create a story.
For farm animals, get the tray, pour some oats and let your toddler place them wherever he wants. Insects can be put in real soil, but sea animals can swim in one of the buckets you have at home. All of these animals can get a good wash afterward.
7. Do the washing
You probably noticed how kids love helping you with chores, especially doing your dishes after dinner. If you have got little kitchen at home, then your toddler already knows what it is to wash the dishes. For the ones who don’t have dishes, animals can get a bath instead. This is a good practice for kids and it is a lot of fun for them.
8. Water activities
Similar to the activities with sand, soil, playdough, shaving foam or oats, games with water develop your toddler’s motor skills like crazy. Simply pour water in a plastic bucket and add whatever you have at home, for example, little plastic balls or Christmas tree baubles. Then give your baby a ladle and let him catch all the content placing it in the other basket.
9. Do the cooking
Among all the routines that you can involve your baby into, cooking is the most important by far. This is not only to make him busy while you make dinner, but it actually helps your toddler try this morsel after he cooked it, even if it is something he always spits out. In my case, it is fish or veggies (tell me more about it!).
Cooking also helps to increase your toddler’s vocabulary learning about kitchenware and tableware. It is essential to let him blend things, mix, pour or break eggs. You can even let him cut veggies with his own plastic knife.
10. Placing things in the bottle
When there is nothing you have got around, just use whatever you have got in the kitchen. One of the greatest examples: take a bag of rice (or pasta, any kind of grains, cereals, etc.) and provide your child with an empty bottle. The narrow the bottleneck is the better. Let your toddler fill the bottle with all these foods. This also develops motor skills and coordination a lot, especially at the early stage for kids before 2 years of age.
This could be clothespins or any other items too. Use your imagination!
11. Painting
Well, there is a lot you can do by painting. It all depends on what you paint and what you use to paint. The choice is yours. I’d just give some awesome ideas my child and I have recently discovered.
One of them is painting with a refillable pen, however, we prefer to use a paintbrush to color because our son is 2 years old. He absolutely adores these coloring books that include many themes. Our favorite includes a farm, safari, and under the sea topics. You can find the whole “Water Wow” range here and pick whichever you like.
Use potatoes
Peel some potatoes, slice them thick and let your toddler place one slice into some paint, then press it on a piece of paper. Potatoes leave interesting marks, and also this type of painting is least messy by far.
Make an autumn tree
Draw a tree on a paper using a pencil, pen or marker. Then pour different color paints on a plate. Take a clothespin and pin the cotton ball with it. Now let your toddler hold the pin and use different colors to paint the tree with thousands of beautiful leaves.
Don’t have a cotton ball in the house? Not to worry! Try using bath sponge, a piece of Lego or simply your own finger. The autumn tree looks great with any possible case-scenarios.
Mark human body parts
For little artists, cut a man from white paper and paste it on any other colored paper. Then give a brush to your toddler and ask to paint different parts of the body, such as hands, arms, legs, neck, etc.
Hand marking
All kids love messy play. What can be messier than leaving a print of your entire hand? Let your toddler choose the color, help him paint his entire palm and paste it on a paper. Later decorate it as crazy as your imagination lets you. You can make a fish, bee, octopus or frog out of it; it can be a pot of flowers; or you can introduce four seasons by making four little prints in four seasonal colors and draw them as sun, snowflake, tree, et cetera.
Fork painting
Alternatively, take a plastic fork and paint with it. As in the example with potatoes, this would be the least messy painting activity. You can make gorgeous tulips, snowflakes or a lion.
12. Shapes sorting suncatcher
Shapes can be learned in various ways too. One of the most interesting ways I find is to use contact paper to stick little shape pieces on the suncatchers. This activity is great for toddlers of 2 to 3 years of age developing their fine motor skills and knowledge about various shapes.
You can find detailed instructions on how to prepare the suncatcher right here.
Again, you always can play around it. If you don’t have a contact paper, just cut the shapes from a regular paper.
Also, you can find different items around the house in the form of a triangle, circle or rectangle, cut three giant shapes out of paper and let your toddler figure out what items belong to which shape.
13. Make a rainbow
As many variations as there could be, I will share only two in this article:
- Use colored round cereals to make a rainbow. Alternatively, you can paint the cereals too.
- Use different shapes in different colors to make one. It is a great idea if you use the contact paper as it was explained in the previous point.
14. Building with Blocks. Nesting and stacking colorful blocks
There is not too much to add to this rather than it is a lot of fun building or stacking blocks. Make it more fun by adding animals and little people to the game.
15. Act!
At last but not least, act! Make stories up, use your imagination and have fun! One of our favorite games is playing a doctor. We use a medical kit with a stethoscope, thermometer, bandages, and 20+ other items. Because of the doctor’s game, we have learned about policemen and firefighters too.
Wish you to have a lot of fun at home with your beloved family!
Crave for more activities for kids? Check these 15 amazing ideas.
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Also, check out:
- Home Fun For Kids: Indoor Activities For Babies, Toddlers, and Kids.
- The Ultimate Guide To Children’s Centres And The Best Free Baby Activities In London.
- All you should know about childcare options in London.
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- Choosing Childcare: where to find the right one for my child.
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Keeping toddlers entertained in these times is challenging. Thank you for these great suggestions.
Thanks, Nicole. I hope these times pass soon and we all have good fun while staying at home 🙂
I miss my kids being little and doing fun activities like this! Great ideas!
Thanks, Julie!
These are great activities at home for toddlers! I love the shape sun catcher idea.
Thanks! I found out that the sun catcher idea is best to do with the contact paper, it is a lot more fun for a kid when he can stick shapes onto something 🙂
So many great ideas in here! We needed some tips to survive the quarantine.
Thank you, Adriane!!!
These are some great ideas! Reading was always high on our list at this age (and, still is!)
Hi Tiffany! Thanks for your comments. I totally agree with you, I could never imagine reading was so important for toddlers, especially if they contain rhymes. Kids just love it and recite books over and over again 🙂
My kids are older but I love the reminder of how much fun painting could be. Those were some great ideas. Thanks!
Thank you, Rina! This toddler age is so much fun indeed!
Thank you for this list, I have been trying to keep my 21 months old toddler entertained. I will definitely be trying the fork painting, it looks like so much fun.
Hi Bolupe! Hope the fork painting will be lots of fun for your toddler, it is least messy painting activity for us haha