Disclosure: This post contains Amazon affiliates. To read more about this, see my disclosure policy.
It’s pretty clear to me that many moms out there are seeking toddler activities to keep their little ones busy. My post on 20 Ways to Keep Toddlers Busy has been my all-time, most viewed and pinned post, so I decided I would add to the list and write 20 MORE ways to keep toddlers busy!! My other post focused on toddler activities that they could do independently. This list is a little different because some of these are activities are designed for parents to do with your toddler to keep them busy. Hope these ideas will be helpful to you!
1. Bathtub with Stuffed Animals
Have a fun playtime with all your child’s favorite stuffed animals! Just simply put them in an empty bathtub and let them play. My kids played for a long time using their imagination. They pretended they were on Noah’s ark during the flood. 🙂
And just for fun, here is a flashback to my sister and I doing when we were kids! (I’m on the left!)
2. Edible Finger Paint
Here’s a fun sensory activity for your toddler — edible finger paint! All you need is flour, water, and food coloring to make this! To see all the details, click here. (One side note- this does not last long. Mine had mold after a week.)
3. Felt Board
To start off, I made a felt board simply by just putting felt onto a bulletin board
We use this felt board to play with our felt activity bags. The activity below is called Little Mouse. For the game, you just hide the mouse under a colored house and say this phrase:
Little Mouse, Little Mouse, Are you hiding behind the ________ (say a color) house?Â
Then you see if they are right. It is a great activity for practicing colors. To see all our felt activities (and get the templates), click here.
4. Car Wash with Toy Cars
This activity is SO fun! We took our toy cars
5. Shaving Cream or Whipped Cream
A fun (but messy) sensory activity is letting your child play with shaving cream or whipped cream. Â The first picture below is my son playing with whipped cream. He is making a forest with pretzel-shaped trees.
We have also played with shaving cream. The picture below shows my son playing with shaving cream and water beads together. If your child puts things in their mouth, then this would not be a good activity for them.
6. Water Beads
Water beads
Since water beads are not edible, you may feel unsafe about letting your little one play with them. Especially if they put things in their mouths! An alternative would be these safe water beads, made from tapioca pearls. You can read how I made them in this post.
7. Button Snake
Create a button snake to help your little one work on their fine motor skills. It’s a great quiet activity, too! To make this, you need a piece of ribbon, two buttons, squares of felt, and needle & thread.
Start by sewing a button on each end of the ribbon. Then cut out squares of felt and cut a slit in the middle.
Then test it out with your toddler! Have them poke the button through the holes in the felt. It may take some time to get the hang of it. This is great for fine motor skills!
8. Bath Paint
In the winter, we play with bath paint several times a week! It’s so easy to make. I squirt shaving cream in a muffin tin and add food coloring to it. Then I let the boys use paint brushes to “paint” their bath tub. They love it!
9. Pom Pom DropÂ
To make this I took an oatmeal container and cut a circle on the top. Then I used large pom poms (found at Hobby Lobby) and had my toddler poke them through the hole. Even though this seems simple, he loved it! We also used this as a counting practice. He loved counting how many pom poms we poked through the hole.
10. Â Colored Spaghetti Noodles
These crazy spaghetti noodles are a super fun sensory activity! To see more on how we did it, visit this post.
11. Sensory Sink
Sensory sinks are really fun to set up. It’s similar to the car wash, but they have a theme. This one is a pond. To see more on our sensory sink, click here.
12. Fine Motor Practice with Cheerios
My kids love this activity. Just take some play dough, roll it in a ball, then stick spaghetti noodles on the top. Have your toddler slide cheerios down the noodle. It’s simple, but great for practicing fine motor skills! And it really keeps them busy.
13. Sensory Bottles
Sensory bottles are beautiful and fun for little ones to shake and explore. To see how we made these, click here.
14. Melting Ice
There’s something about melting ice that’s fun for kids. We like to freeze water balloons and then squirt them with warm water in squeeze bottles
You could also stick little treasures inside the water before freezing them. We did that with a spikey ball in this post.
Or you could put little dinosaurs in the water balloons and make them Dino Eggs! You can read how we did that here.
15. Cardboard Box Fort
It’s funny how kids love playing with simple things…like cardboard boxes! My husband brought home this huge box from work one day, so we turned it into a little fort. My son played with it for hours!
16. Hammer Golf Tees in Styrofoam
For this activity, I took a block of styrofoam and had my toddler use a toy hammer to poke in golf tees.
17. Ice Cube Painting
So for this activity, you just fill an ice tray with water and color the water with food coloring. Put them in the freezer and after 20 minutes, stick toothpicks or rounded popscicle sticks into them. Let them freeze until solid. Then you pop them out of the try and have your toddler paint with them. It will look like watercolors on the paper. I know some of you will tell me that toothpicks are sharp and dangerous…and I agree. I should have used popsicle sticks with my toddler. Next time I will!
18. Cloud Dough
This is probably one of our all-time favorite things to do. You just need flour and oil (I use baby oil) and you can make this! You can find the recipe here.
19. Sidewalk Paint
We love coloring the sidewalk with this paint! All you do is mix 1 part water to 1 part cornstarch
20. Cardboard Tubes with Pom Poms
In my other toddler post, I shared the activity of dropping pom poms down a cardboard tube. To spice up the activity, you could add more than one tube. My toddler had so much fun with this variation of the activity. You could try it so many different ways!
Hope you’ll try some of these activities out with your toddlers! Happy Playing!
Want more toddler ideas? Check out my book, Play and Learn Toddler Activities. This book is filled with over 200 hands-on activities for toddlers that are fun, easy, and will keep your toddler busy! Click here for more information.
Wow, so many ideas of activities!! Thank You
These are some great ideas! I am trying to replace screen time with quiet time and activity time so I will definitely use these! I was wondering about the sidewalk paint, I how easy is it to wash off. My daughter loves drawing with wet chalk so I’m sure she would like painting on the sidewalk too.
It is easy to wash off if you use liquid food coloring or liquid watercolors for the colors. Have fun!
Dear Angela,
I was researching to find kids play ideas to publish in my Facebook page. I am in the process of promoting that we parents monitor our kids (even pre-teens), and provide them with fun and safe activities to do instead of using the screens.
My three kids are already grown up, and I did not have the tools available today back in the 90s. So if Ok for you I will start follow you and publishing your posts in my FB page.
Yes! That would be fine. Thanks for introducing yourself!
loved it really creative ideas and the good thing is you do a lot of things to keep your child busy because they get bore of things in a short time
hanaan recently posted…How To Wash Car Seat Straps?
Great ideas, thanks! Somehow my toddler just loves messy activities 🙂
Wow, lots of activities never thought of.
Thank You
Thanks for posting this! This is a great overview of some sensory play experiences that help keep toddlers busy (and out of trouble!). One of our strategies when using large bins of tiny objects is to lay down a big plastic liner or tarp under the table – that makes clean-up a TON easier. We also try to do a lot of activities out on the back deck to save our sanity. I’d hate to have a look under the deck to see all the little things that have fallen between the cracks – out of sight, out of mind, right!? 🙂
Anyway, keep up the great work, this is one of our go-to blogs for finding fun activities and the best baby/toddler/kid products for making those activities possible!
Thanks for these interesting ideas! I was looking for some funny activities that would keep my boys busy (they are almost 2 y.o.) and help them to practice motor skills at the same time. I think we will try this thing with Cheerios and edible paint, I’ve never thought about it before but I think it’ll be funny and engaging for my kiddos 🙂
It is not always possible for us to entertain our little ones and we often find ourselves at a loss of ideas. This post is such a relief. The ideas are outstanding and safe as well. Thank you so much for the information and thoughts. Useful and informative post for all,
I love that idea for the felt board. I made one recently but used foam core board, hot glue, and duct tape. The duct tape doesn’t really like to stick to felt. My mom gave me my old bulletin boards so I think I’m going to have to use those for our new felt boards. Great idea!!!
Interestingly great ideas, Some of them are definitely worth a try. I am sure the kids would be loving them.
Keep up the good work 🙂
Thanks for sharing these ideas.I was looking for some activities for my son as he is into cartoons this week.Thanks!
These are some really cute ideas for toddlers. I especially love the “car wash with toy cars”, as I think my boys will like that. I also really liked the “water beads” idea, I’d probably be playing right along with them!
Brilliant! Thanks so much for all these amazing ideas. I thought I offered my toddlers variety but had not thought of any of these so can’t wait for them to wake up tomorrow and start giving some a try.
These are awesome! Thank you!
Thank you so much for these easy, fun ideas! I have stage IV Cancer and not a lot of energy. Now I have lots of fun things I can do with my toddler grandkids – so wonderful! Looking for similar mode of ideas for my 8 year old granddaughter. This is also new territory for me as I had 3 brothers and 3 sons – not used to the girls :). Thanks again!
Your ideas are just AMAZING!!!! I’m soooo looking foward to my son being a little older (he is 14 months now) to try them!!! You’re inspiring! Thanks a lot!
Fantastic! Creative! Great ideas to use for children with a disability.
Fantastic games for tots to keep them busy at home. thank you
These ideas for kids are awesome. My favourite two are the toy car wash and the bathtub full of toys. I have a similar website with kids ideas being http://www.excitedkids.com but I hadn’t thought of a lot of these. I will add a link to this page as these are really good. Well done!
Very creative and easy to set up. Great ideas to inspire play and. learning.
WOW! I am so impressed. These are all great and creative ideas! As an OTR/L, I must say that there are some great fine motor skills that can be practiced with so many of these activities. Not only will I use them for my own kids, but for my clients as well! Thank you!
~ Judy
Great Ideas! Love them!
Thank you for sharing your great ideas for little ones. Will try some of them with my grandchildren
Amazing ideas! Thanks a lot for sharing!!!! I am looking forward to tomorrow even more than before!
So many great ideas that I can’t wait to use!! Thank you so much. My little guy just turned two and we are at the point in the winter when I am looking for new things to do with him.
Carolyn recently posted…Mother and Daughter
Hey there! Fantastic ideas and as an ECE I applaud your play based approach to teaching! Small tip for you regarding the edible finger paint: if you add in a little bit of cream of tartar (get it in the baking aisle I think it) your paint won’t go mouldy as fast!
Thank you so much, Jennifer! I appreciate your tip, too! Will try that next time.
Fantastic ideas all in one place – Thank You!!!!
Love the cardboard tube with pom poms!
love the tube idea..but I think I will try it with hotwheel cars…think the boys will like that idea.
Thanks so much for these ideas. They will help on the days that I Ikeep my 3 year old granddaughter.
Cute ideas! I’ll keep these in mind for when my son becomes a toddler.
Love your ideas, thanks!!
sarah recently posted…A fun new Sensory material!