Activities for Toddlers (FREE & FUN TODDLER ACTIVITIES)

The importance of toddler activities:

Activities for toddlers are fun to be a part of and are a great way to bond with your toddler and in the same sentence making process in the learning field.

Activities are great when you want to teach your child something but make it into a playful matter.

Later on in this article you will learn more on activities for 2 and 3 year olds. There are even activities for 5 year olds.

Are you always looking for fun activities for toddlers and activities to do with toddlers? Then you most certainly came to the right place.

There are several fun toddler activities you can do with your toddler, but do remember that it is important to have a good balance between indoor activities for toddlers and outdoor activities for toddlers.

Toddlers should get plenty of physical and outdoor activity to develop fine gross motor skills.

Indoor and outdoor activities play a huge role in the physical and mental development of your toddler. These activities are teaching them the right stuff they need for their age and another bonus is that you can sometimes have some free time to yourself. This will also tell whether your child is ready for preschool.

It is essential to find the best activities for your child’s age. This is because not all activities are safe for that age. Activity for toddlers and infants in the age group 12 – 18 months are limited to the indoors.

That is why that you must plan your daily activities for infants and toddlers based on more indoor activities than the outdoors.

Typical activities include playing with balls and throwing them, identifying objects and shapes, finding the missing toy, and lots more which you will learn about below.

Once your child turns 2 you can interpret more language activities for toddlers. You may find some activities that your toddler can play by himself giving you some time to cook or wash the dishes but most of the time you should take part in the young toddler activities.

Jigsaw puzzles, Lego and building blocks for children are easily accessible. And this is an important indoor activity that helps your child develop the basic things in life.

When your child reaches the age of 2-year-old, activities can include drawing, books, painting and apps that will stimulate their brain. Just remember that your child must do some kind of outside activities for toddler each day to give your child the opportunity to enhance social and motor skills.

It is very difficult to come up with new ideas for toddler activities since toddlers lose interest so easily. It does not mean that you cannot play activities from the past but always remember to add something new each time.

Season Activities:

Top 5 fall activities for toddlers:

It’s time to come up with new ideas when fall approaches. Here are some great toddler fall activities you can try with your toddler and ensure they are enjoying these fall toddler activities for quite some time.

These activities can become quite messy, but what the heck, as long as your child enjoys it, and you know you will actually enjoy it as well. These are perfect for toddler winter activities as well.

Shaving cream marbling autumn leaves:

Spray a whole can of cheap shaving cream into a shallow tray and spread it out.
Pour yellow and red paint op top and mix with a paintbrush.
You can add gold litter to the top. (Optional)
Next take some paper and lay it on top of the mixture, carefully take the paper of and use old card paper to scrape most of the paint of the paper. Set the paper in a sunny area and let it dry well.
(Optional:) Once this is done, print the image of the leafs below and glue on the back of your paint paper. Then cut out various leaf shapes.
Make as many as you want and repeat step 4. Now what shall we do with the leftover mixture?
You can then let your child play with the shaving cream mixture letting her sensory skills improve just a little. Your child can trace letter or numbers in the mixture.
When the paper has completely dried, you can cut out various leaf shapes and using sticky tape, arrange the leaves on a wall. It should look like falling leafs.

Coloring Pages:

You can always let your child color in Autumn coloring pages.

Stained Glass Fall Leaf Art:

Firstly, you will need black glue. To make black glue, take a 1/3 full bottle of old school glue and mix black paint with the clue. Make sure it’s a dark black color, shake the bottle carefully.
Let your toddler draw some leaf shapes or print the above image and go over it with the black glue. Let them dry completely.
Once this has dried, use water paint and paint in between the black glue lines. Let them dry, it should dry pretty fast.
Then hang then on an open space window and see how amazing this looks. This activity is perfect for winter activities for toddlers as well.

Recycled autumn leaf mobile:

First, you will need to go to your local supermarket and ask them for old fruit cardboards. These are free.
You may need to go outside for this as this activity can get messy, but if it’s too cold, lay down lots of old newspapers.
Put the old fruit cardboard or box along with some autumn colored paint, and let your toddler paint the cardboard. You may also let your child paint over the other paint with some glitter.
Once the tray has completely dried, you can cut out leaf shapes. Older children can cut these out themselves, but young toddlers may need a little help from mommy.
Now gather an old twig from the garden and hang leafs on the twig, some lower than the other, it looks really cool and sparkly.

Leafy letter collage:

For this project, you will need to go and collect various colors leafs and sizes. Make sure you get enough; you can always throw the other away.

First, start by drawing a letter on a big piece of paper, for instance, the first letter of your child’s name. Now spread some clue all over the big letter and let your child put some leafs on top.
When this had dried, you can hang this on their bedroom draw. This is quite fun! Or another thing you may want to try is to draw big letters of your child’s name. Cut each letter out in a leaf shape and let them also cover the letter with leaves. Then make a string of letter of your child’s name and get a good place for this to hang.

Here is our attempted version of this activity:

I printed the letter ‘M’ which is the first letter of my toddler’s name. On the left side, we have some leafs we collected from our garden.

Next, I glued spots on the paper, and she helped me pressed the leafs onto the paper. This is quite tricky, that’s why you must glue just once spot at a time.

I then took the paper with the leafs and laminated it. I would not recommend laminating it because it comes loose, but it looks good and will probably last a few months.

Do this activity with your toddler and see how much fun it brings.

Autumn Hands:

Get some autumn colored paper and draw your child’s hands on them. Cut them out and set aside.
Now take a paper place and stick the hands on the paper place, letting the fingers show to the outside.
Optional: Your child can paint her hands and press the painted hands on a normal white paper and then cut the hands out.

Summer activities for toddlers:

Summer days are very long, and as a parent, you need new ideas for summer toddler activities. These ideas are easy, super fun for toddlers and not expensive at all.

The things you will need are most likely the things you already have at home lying around.

These projects are perfect for spring activities for toddlers too. Once summer approaches us, I will do these activities with my toddler daughter and will takes some pictures and upload it here, so you can see some examples.

Here are my Top 5 toddler summer activities:

Ice Painting:

This project is also perfect for valentine activities for toddlers. You just need to use heart shape molds instead.

You will need:

Any shape molds
Crayola washable paint
Popsicle sticks

Method on how to create the ice painting lollipops:

Pour a little of paint in the bottom of the mold and fill the rest of the mold with water. Put in the freezer and let it set for an hour or until it has harden.
After the hour, stick some popsicle sticks into the ice, and let it set overnight.
Take them out and let your child begin to draw or paint with her new ice popsicle paintbrushes.
If you really want you can paint the popsicle sticks before putting them into the ice cubes.

Icy Toys:

Get some small toys from your child’s toy box and fill a bowl with water. You can color the water if you want, it will look just so much better.
Put the water bowl into the freezer and keep looking to see that it has not turned into ice yet. It should be hard enough for the toys to hold in a certain place but still soft enough to get the toys inside.
Once you have reached the desired consistency, take the bowl out and place the toys wherever you like.
Then freeze the bowl with the toys overnight. The next morning, make sure that the ice is hard enough.
For those hot summer days, take it outside and let your toddler play with the icy toys, it will take forever to get the toys out of the ice, but once your child see one toy coming out, she will have a curiosity expression on her face and will continue to play for hours and hours.

Do it yourself Water Wall:

This project is quite interesting, but I am not sure how long this can entertain your toddler.
Take 4 – 5 bottles and cut one side the size of your hand open. Do this with all the bottles.
Stick them to a wall like the image below. Make sure to remove the bottle caps. On the ground have a bucket filled with beads, nice thick beads. Your toddler will enjoy the beads floating around in the bucket as soon as the water starts pouring into the bucket.
Let your child take water and begin by the top of the wall and fill that bottle with the water. Now, watch how the water floats from one bottle to the other. Quite fascinating.

Rock Painting:

This project is a free toddler activities project. And can provide a few minutes of fun.

There are two ways your toddler can paint a rock:

You can collect rather big rocks lying around the garden and let your child paint the rock, any color he/she likes.
The other way is to have a large sheet of butcher paper and pour some paint on it. Let your toddler mix the paints all over the paper. Now take some rocks and roll the rocks in the paint. This is quite crazy.

Racetrack Fun:

This project is perfect for physical activities for toddlers if you have enough sand lying around.

You will need to build a racetrack. Use your imagination to build a racetrack out of sand. Make bumps in the road, have parking spaces.

Use recycled boxes to build garages and stuff, just go wild. Even girls can play this, and it provides hours of fun.

Holiday activities for toddlers:

I will list one activity for each holiday. These are my personal favorites, and I am sure you are also going to love it!

Thanksgiving activities for toddlers:

Click on the image below and then right-click on the image below and save the image, then cut it out onto colored paper.

Now provide your child with glue, feathers, sewing buttons big and small, pieces of felt or anything you think will look good on a turkey.

This project is the perfect gross motor activities for toddlers.

Halloween activities for toddlers:

Ghost bowling:

Take 6 recycled white plastic cups and draw faces on them, don’t worry to draw some neat faces, just 2 dots for the eyes, a dot for the nose and an oval dot for the mouth.

Make a sensory balloon filled with flour and tie a knot. This should be an orange balloon.

Place your first 3 cups on the ground, then 2 and then one. Let your toddler throw or roll the balloon and see how many cups he can destroy. These toddlers’ activities are perfect if you have a group of toddlers to entertain.

Easter activities for toddlers:

There are quite a few toddler Easter activities you can try but for now, I am going to tell you just my favorite one.

Hollow eggs treasure hunt:

Make a hole in the eggs and let the egg run out of the hole. Let the hollow eggs dry completely. Now get some paint and paintbrushes and paint those hollow eggs.

Let them dry again. You can now get a twig from the garden and hang your eggs, or you can play hide-and-seek with them, you hide the eggs and your toddler must find then.

This is a great toddler activity idea.

Once Easter approaches, I will do these activities with my daughter and will takes some pictures and upload it here, so you can see examples.

Christmas activities for toddlers:

You can create a big Christmas tree out of green colored paper and brown stem. Now print some photos of the family and let your children place these photos on the tree.
Let them decorate or help you decorate the Christmas tree.

Making your own Santa:

You will need: 1 Paper Plate, Red colored card paper and cotton wool.

First start with the beard… Glue some glue on the bottom of the paper plate and stick cotton balls down. Then make Santa’s hat. Cut out a hat shape out of the red colored paper and glue it onto the paper plate.

Put more cotton wool on the edge of the hat and make a ball for the point of Santa’s hat. You can do Santa, an Elf or even a reindeer; just let your creativity explode.

Indoor toddler activities:

Here are a few fun indoor activities for toddlers you can try:

Ice cube boats:

Fill some ice cube holders with water and poor in various food color into the water, now have a few washing pecks at hand. Stick toothpicks into the water and let the washing pecks hold the sticks upright. Leave in freezer overnight.

Take them out of the freezer and draw triangles on colored paper and stick them onto the tooth picks as boat sails. Put these cubes in the bathtub and let your toddler play.

Bath time Paint:

In an ice cube tray, pour in each hole a little bit of baby shampoo and a bit of cornstarch. Now add one drop of food coloring to each hole. Undress your child, run the bath and let your child’s creativity flow with this bath time painting.

Dough:

Put everything out for her, from cookie cutters to rolling pins and measuring cups. This is an old trick but definitely works. This project is perfect for toddler indoor activities and cannot really be played outside unless you want to throw the dough away.

Clothespin Wreath:

Take a wire hanger and mold it into a circle shape. You will need 1 – 2 packs of wooden clothespins. Now let your child paint the clothespins. When they are dry let your toddler clip them onto the wired shape. This will look so beautiful and you can hang it on your front door for the holiday season, depending on what colors you painted them.

Blocks:

Build a nice tall tower out of building blocks and let your young toddler knock it over, or let him try to build himself. These are great for fine motor activities for toddlers.

Once they get the hang of it, their face impression is marvelous. You can also build a house out of blocks and get smaller toys and play with the toys and house.

These projects listed above are also great for rainy day activities for toddlers. When you really need rainy day toddler activities, just cuddle up with your toddler and watch a movie or read a book of his choice… some great bonding time.

Toddler Outdoor activities:

Draw shapes and faces on the ground:

My toddler is at that stadium that she knows her basic shapes and when we go outside, she usually brings me a rock and ask met to draw a triangle or heart. Sometimes I draw a doll, a cat, a dog, and she must tell me what I am drawing.

Sidewalk chalk:

Draw any shapes on the sidewalk with a calk and if your toddler can jump let her jump. When she gets the hang of the jumping, you can let her throw a small stone onto the drawing, and wherever the stone lands, she must skip that certain block.

When we were children we loved to play this game with our friends and provided tons of fun and toddler physical activities.

Outdoor toddler activities with soapy water:

Fill a bucket with water and a little bit of baby shampoo; just enough to get some soapy bubbles. Then let your child wash or clean her outside rides. When the rides are all covered in soap, help your child to open the hose and let she rinse down the rides. This outdoor activity is for a very hot sunny day.

Grow a mini-garden:

Use seeds from already-thriving seedlings and a little bit of pot soil. Let him or her give their garden water every day and let them watch as the plant grows every day. You will see a sign of accomplishment on your toddlers face when he sees the plant grow.

Make bubbles:

But not just any bubbles, monster bubbles. To make these use 1 cup of dish washing liquid and 1 gallon of water. Add 2 -3 tables spoons glycerin. Pour the concoction into a flat try and using a DIY wand from an old wire hanger which you shape in different shapes. Now show your child how to blow these big monster bubbles.

Here are quite a few toddler activities you can try with your toddler. Use these activities with toddler as a guideline and make up your own games and activities.

Let your creativity flow and remember to have fun! These activities are also great bonding time with your toddler and remember that they grow up so fast, so use these toddler activity ideas and make some good memories your toddler will treasure for the rest of his/ her life.