When the cold winter days are full of chaos and need to be tamed, and heading outdoors isn’t an option, it is great to have some quick and simple indoor toddler activities on hand. Check out these ideas that improve fine motor skills or challenge gross motor skills. Some of these indoor toddler activities may become your lifesavers on chilly days!
Indoor Toddler Activities
Bowl indoors.
If you need to burn some energy, use a hallway or another open spot in your home and set up a mock bowling alley. You can use pop bottles or paper towel tubes as bowling pins and grab a couple of the kids’ balls to use as bowling balls.
Have fun with tape.
Tape a line on the floor that goes in several different directions (think straight, zig zag and curvy). Have the kids walk the line. If they master walking forward, have them go backward. This is a wonderful indoor gross motor skill activity.
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| Having fun picking up blocks with our tongs. |
Block fun.
Get out the blocks and build some towers. When the kids tire of that, take turns using some tongs to pick blocks up.
Play in the tub.
Let your kids put on some swim suits and clean their toys in the tub, or get a bunch of different-sized cups from the cabinet — even grab a colander – and let the children transfer water from cup to cup.
Set up a simple scavenger hunt.
Who doesn’t love treasure and scavenger hunts? They always go over well with kids. Around our house, we often find our small stuffed Geo, a character from a television show my kids like called Umi Zoomi, and play hide and seek with it. When Geo is hidden and the kids are searching for him, I give the kids clues about how close they are to Geo by telling them if they are “cold, warm or hot.” They love this easy and fun game, and I actually enjoy it, too.
Sort some buttons.
Get out cups and buttons. Have your kids sort the buttons by size, color or the number of
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| Photo credit: flickr |
holes (two or four) in the button.
Put leftover tissue paper to use.
If you’re like me, you have a lot of spare tissue paper lying around this time of the year! Crumble up tissue paper and make a tossing game out of it.
Pull out the pots and pans.
As long as you don’t mind some noise, pull out the pots and pans and let the children make some music. Wooden spoons make perfect drum sticks!
I hope this list of simple, indoor activities helps you keep your little ones entertained during the next few cool months. Have any activities that your children love? We would love to hear about them.
Tags: cold weather
