Many parents are designing interesting and fun activities for their children during these pandemic days. Of course, you don’t need too many fancy, expensive toys or materials for these activities!

These activities, which you can do with materials you can find at home, are not only a creative art project for toddlers, but also very important to develop fine motor skills such as cutting, painting and coloring. We share the materials you need and the step-by-step activity details with you below.

Activities That Can Be Done At House With Toddlers

In this age group, colorful cubes, large-shaped puzzles, toys that make a sound when shaken attract their attention. You can buy toys with soft edges that will not harm them and will not harm the environment when thrown away. Besides these activities, you can try to do 5–7-pieces puzzles together. You can enliven fairy tales with hand gestures and sing songs together. If your toddler gets bored easily with their toys you may hide them and show them later. This will create curiosity and joy for your baby.

For these activities, you can build fun games with your own hands if you wish, let’s examine these handcrafted toys in the list below.

  • Race field made of pool noodles: Cut one of the pools noodle which we use in the pool in half. It will make your job easier to choose a pool noodle with holes in the middle. Then you can use the channel in the middle as a track to race ping pong balls or small cars.
  • Various animal figures from play dough: Play doughs are cheap materials that take shape easily and mold at the temperature they are in. You can create colorful or one-colored animals or encourage your child to create them.
  • Strainer and straw game: try inserting inexpensive flexible straws into the holes of the strainer to close all the holes. This game is very useful for fine motor skills.
  • Art with popcorn: For this game buy some glue by popping popcorn. In this activity, use your creative powers to stick different types of corn onto cardboard. design the corns as snow or as the hair of the girl you draw.
  • Bee and hive made with balloon and board : While explaining why bees are important creatures for our world, create lines on yellow balloons with felt-tip pens and design their eyes and wings out of cardboard. If you wish, you can design the hive with your child and discover the secret life of bees.
  • Coloring of animal figures: Let’s create as many dolphins, turtles, fish and sea horses as you wish. Take pictures of the figures and arrange them like a collage.
  • Shoe box with felt-tip pens: Felt-tip pens are suitable for small hands and easy to hold by children. To let your child have fun make a game out of this activity. First, color the shoe box with felt-tip pens while listening to music or singing songs if you wish. After that, arrange the colored shoe box in a way that is interesting to you both or throw them randomly on the floor for fun.
  • Felt-tip pens made of potato: Potatoes can be used for all kinds of art projects as it is a cheap, but also high quality material. For this project you need an acrylic paint and felt-tip pens. Take the leaf from the potato (with its stem) and tie the stem to a toothpick or use a hole punch to make holes in it. Then you can use the potato leaf like you use your regular felt-tip pens.
  • Tin cans to make musical instruments: Let’s collect tin cans or cans you have used before. Wash them carefully then remove all their labels and some of their lids so that they look like empty bottles. Then your baby can play music by banging these cans on the table.
  • Finger puppets from plastic boxes: To make these finger puppets you need a plastic box without any sharp edges. Wash the box, then paint it with white tempera. Press a piece of paper into the box and fold it up, so that the paper cover the box like a lid. Attach magnets to one of its sides to hold the puppet together. You can do this activity in two ways:
    Assembling shapes: Let’s put together plastic shapes you have already bought to make different objects than usual. You can use barrettes and coat-hangers as your carpenter pencils by cutting off their ends, then join them like magnets on the side of another shape
    Making animal figures out of clay: Let’s mash clay with your hands or buy ready-made clays from natural paints or playdoughs. Then you can use your fingers to create as many little creature figures as you like.

In this short but informative article, we tried to share some of the ideas you can use to design activities for toddlers. Although these are simple suggestions, they have great effects on young children.