It is becoming crucial these days to find some fun activities that are engaging for the kids. Not just so your kids are entertained, so that you are having good quality time with your little ones when you are taking some time of your busy work day. What I tend to do as a working mom, is breaking my day. I aim to spend each day 1/2 hours in the morning and 1/2 hours in the afternoon.
Here below are some fun activities that you can try with your toddler during your work breaks that are tested and confirmed to be entertaining!
Floating vs Sinking Experiment
Fill a tray, bowl or a small bucket with some water. Gather from the house with your child some toys and items to experiment. It is more fun if they help you. They feel really engaged. You can pick together items like :
- Small cars ( especially boys love it based on experience :))
- Small doll figurines perhaps for girls
- Balls
- Pencil
- Utensils like fork, spoon etc.
After you pick the items, encourage your child to guess if they will sink or float and let them observe as they put each object in the water. You can also discuss with them on their shape, size and weights. Their predictions will help the kids to learn and also guess better for the next time. It will help them make better assumptions as you experiment together. This is a fun science activity that will help with your kids’ personal, social and emotional development.
Socks Matching
Collect clean socks from the laundry basket. This is more fun if there are different size, shape and color socks all piled up. While your child is picking up the socks, ask them to lay them with similar types and try to find the matching pair. As they start placing them correctly, you can also discuss with them on their texture, color, size and ask them to compare them which one is bigger, smaller, mommy’s socks, daddy’s socks and their own socks and they can compare and see who has the biggest feet! 🙂
Arts & Crafts – Turtle
When it comes to crafting, there are so many creative things you can do. What we usually like doing with my son is working with the color papers and paint such as pastel or water color and creating art by using a child scissors. You can make a turtle for instance very easily by using these items:
- 1 middle size paper plate
- Glue stick
- Green paper
- Green Paint (Crayon/Water Color /Markers /Color Pensils)
We first start with painting the paper plate to green using any green color paint available in the house. Water color is easy for painting bigger areas so your kid may enjoy that. You can also choose crayons instead, which will be less messy for sure.
Once you finish coloring the plate, put it in the middle of your green paper and glue it. Then cut out 4 feet, 1 head and a small triangle tail for the turtle (as we did with my son- see in the photos ) around the green plate. And voila! Your green turtle is ready 🙂
If you have other accessories to add and more time to create fancier animals and shapes, definitely go for it, you can perhaps add googly eyes and use paint sponges if you have all the tools you need in the house. Ours is based on a house that is currenlty in lock down and since the stores are all closed, we are using all items we currently have in the house. You can also order online any items you like to add or missing in your activity set.
Matching The Numbers (1-10)
This is a nice, easy and fun math activity to do with your little ones. You can write down 1-10 numbers on cards by cutting small card board papers. Now as a responsible parent, I am sure you will do better than I did. I forgot to count the number of objects we chose which was cars in our case and we ran out in the middle of this exercise 🙂 Your child will try to match the correct number of objects with their number card by placing each under. You can choose any object, it can be small figurines, balls, cars just whatever you choose make sure you have enough to match each card number 🙂
Body and Objects Printing
An other very easy and fun activity that will keep your little one busy. You can do hand print, leave print any type what you need is a bit of paint and paper. They will dip the object in the paint and then off to the paper. That’s it! It is pretty self explanatory so I will just leave it to your creativity and I am also sharing below some images for your reference. Enjoy!
Matching colors & objects
For this activity, you will only need color papers and objects that are the same color to match the objects. Similar to socks pairing activity, your child can group and place them with matching color papers.
Making a Tower
You only need paper cups and that’s it! You can even leave this activity to your kid and go back to your laptop to work because this extremely simple yet effective activity will keep them busy quite a while. They will do it again and again as it keeps falling. See the images below.
Arts & Crafts- Under The Sea
Similar to the turtle activity, you will need these materials:
- Color paper
- Scissors
- Marker
Start by cutting various sea creatures like fish, octopus, jelly fish, star using different color papers. Next, glue them all on a blue color paper. They will love to point out and show you each which will open up a nice conversation about sea life and under water creatures.
Splash Splash Splash
Something that never gets old for young kids is to be in the water. They get immediately happy to be in their swimming outfit and playing with their ducks and floating boats. If you are living in a house with garden, a small inflatable pool is the perfect entertainment that will keep them going sometimes for hours. This is one of my favorite work break activities as I get to see the biggest smile on my son’s face while he is splashing all water over me!
If you are living in an apartment, don’t you worry. You can just take them on a tour to bath tub to fill and play. Get creative and put in some of their favorite sea toys in. The good thing you can also add in some bubbles that will keep them busy as well!
Afternoon Picnic
What is better than taking your kid and their favorite plush toys on a picnic? You can have tea time, lay down on your picnic mat. If you are in the garden, look up to the skies and talk about the clouds and play games on finding shapes that look like animals or objects they are familiar with. Take on some snacks like fruits, crackers to add on the fun!
Bubbles, Bubbles, more Bubbles
If your kid is anything like mine, you can never get enough amount of bubbles to stock in the house. It is a life saver. I use it during emergency situations for distraction like crying for TV time or even just cranky for no reason. As soon as the bubbles come out, bye bye crocodile tears!
Gymnastics
It is the best to take some energy out of the little ones by doing some home exercises! They will also sleep better at nights so let’s keep moving. You can turn on YouTube and look for kids work out videos. You might want to put on your sports wear for this one as you’ll definitely not want to miss out on the fun!