Busy activities for younger kids...

C
courtcarp
380

I am looking for suggestions on easy, child-led activities for my 3 and 1 year old to do while their older siblings are at school and when I have chores to do. I feel like it’s only an hour or two throughout the day, but it becomes so easy to get caught in a habit of TV time. Any ideas?

    2 answers

    • jon
      200

      every kid’s interests are a little different, and our kids are a couple years older now, but i think the biggest thing for us is having a space — like a corner of the family room, etc — that is explicitly “theirs” and where we can send them to play. we stock it with activities like @ktisme listed.

      the ones that were most popular for our crew at that age were:

      - an art table with washable markers, crayons, maybe some stamps. giving each kid their own sketchbook (with their name on it) was huge for them, it seemed to give them some sort of “license to create” haha. we love the Strathmore sketchbooks!
      - toy cars (Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Green Toys). not sure why our son loves these SO MUCH but at 1yo he could play with them for an hour easy.
      - a bucket of Duplo blocks is just amazing.
      - a bunch of brightly colored, interesting looking books to flip through.
      - kid puzzles (Melissa & Doug are great, but so are the simple cardboard ones)
      - they loved Tonies and would often have one playing in the background

      obv the kids would rather have been watching TV, but i think having their activity space kind of put them in the mode of “ok it’s time to play quietly ourselves” when we would send them over there.

      @ritu will probably have a bunch more ideas.

      • K
        ktisme
        50

        Kinetic sand boxes. There are cute mini sand toys on Amazon, or you could do fairy-garden or paleontologist excavator style.
        Large beads on strings. You can also do patterns prompts.
        Tannograms, marble runs, little games they can play together (paper, ping pong balls in bowls/cups). Crayola color wonder has a few media options (paint, markers, etc). My kids like the magnet toys (like Pixel art or lite-brite) that you use on top of an image.
        If using shows, you can have it be educational. The Preschool Prep Company has a ~$4 phonics video available on Prime and it really helped my kids prepare for reading (they have sight words, digraphs, math, too), also, the Leap Frog Letter Factory (we bought on it Google movie).

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