More Activity Ideas
- For a young baby, a clean, light scarf can be a fun thing to reach for, bat at, grasp, shake, stroke, and examine. Put a knot in one end for chewing. Or you can play with it together when you toss or wave it and let it float down on your baby. Your older baby will have fun squeezing a scarf, pulling it out of a tissue box, waving it to music, or shaking one end while a friend or sibling shakes the other.
- Pretend to be something else. Make different sounds and use different voices—squeak like a mouse, whisper like the wind, talk in a deep voice like a giant.
- Make a simple sock puppet and have it “talk” to or tickle your baby. Is your baby giggling? Do it some more!
- Let your baby get messy. Mud pies anyone? If you support his messiness now, he’s likely to be comfortable with finger paint, clay, and paste when he’s ready for these materials.
- Provide dolls, stuffed animals, and toys like balls and blocks to play with. They don’t have to be fancy or store-bought. In fact, simpler toys often give your baby more opportunities to explore and be creative.
- Provide both girls and boys with a variety of toys—don’t give only dolls to girls or trucks to boys.
- Wonder out loud about the things you see, hear, taste, smell, and touch.
- Bathtime is a great time for playing. Make up stories about floating toys, pop soap bubbles, and make funny shapes out of shampoo foam.
- Babies love contrast and motion. Sit in the dark with your baby and wave a flashlight so she can watch the light bounce around the room. Direct the light onto certain objects and say, What do we see when the light shines over here? Talk about what you can and can’t see.
- Encourage your baby’s imagination with simple make-believe play. Show him how to comb Teddy’s hair, give him a pretend drink, or put him to sleep. Or crawl around on the floor with your baby as you say We’re bears. Let’s find a cave to sleep in before hibernating in a pillow fort.
- Make inanimate objects come alive! Talk to a chair, a book, or a spoon. Talk with and to your baby’s stuffed animals and dolls. Have these things “talk” to your baby.
- Play when you feed your baby. As you bring the spoon to her mouth say: Open the garage door, here comes the car. Or the spoon can be an airplane flying in for a landing, a train chugging into a tunnel, or a dump truck emptying its load. Beep, zoom, choo-choo, plop!
- Use painter’s tape or masking tape to make roads or train tracks on the floors in your home. Ask your toddler where she wants the road to go. Follow her direction or let her put the tape down where she likes. Make destinations and tunnels with boxes, blocks, pillows, and small toys. As your toddler pushes her vehicles along the roads, ask her where they are going and what they pass along the way.
- Imitate animals or machines. Invite your toddler to do it, too!
- Books you read together may inspire your toddler to imitate the characters or their adventures. You may need to go on a bear hunt after reading We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury or open a pretend dim sum restaurant following a reading of Dim Sum for Everyone! by Grace Lin.
- Build sculptures out of clay, play dough, or other materials. Pipe cleaners poked through a colander make an interesting sculpture, as do clean items in the recycling bin. Let your toddler decide what to make.
- Make things together, such as a collage with items you found on a walk, silly hats out of paper or scrap fabric, or a birthday card for a family member.
- If your toddler is putting words together to ask questions and tell stories, watch a video, such as Spicy Hot Colors (Between the Lions video story) and talk about what you saw. Other Between the Lions options include: Things That Are Red, Brush Dance, and Colors.
- Fill a laundry basket with things your toddler can use for pretend play, such as an old handbag, scarves, keys, an old or toy phone, a notebook, sunglasses, artificial flowers, plastic dishes, and so on.
- Create spaces where your toddler can be messy. Spread newspapers on the kitchen table; play outside with water, soapsuds, piles of leaves, or sidewalk chalk; or turn the bathtub into an easy-to-rinse paint area.
- Ask questions to spark your older toddler’s imagination, such as I wonder what that coffeepot would say if it could talk OR What animals should we be today? OR If you could be anything in the world, what you would be—and why?
- Create your own shadow theater. Sit on the floor and shine a light (a flashlight works well) onto an empty wall. Hold up your hand between the light and the wall to cast a shadow. Your shadow hand can wave to your toddler or make animal shapes, or you can show your toddler what the shadows of her favorite toys look like. Then help her wave her hands or a toy in front of the light.