Home activities with your 2.5 year old?

This winter is truly causing us to go stir crazy.

Our daily activities when stuck indoors are:

Finger painting (takes DS all of 5 minutes to loose interest)
Color
Bake and/or cook together
Read Books
Puzzle
Freeze Dance
Playdough
Watch a special movie/tv show

What am I missing? We are sooooo bored over here!

Re: Home activities with your 2.5 year old?

watercolor paint on easel (takes longer than regular paint)
mr potato head
playing trucks/cars/trains
stickers
foam sheets and stickers
games on laptop or ipad


new favorite is Hide & Seek.
Landon counts to 20 and I hide his 4 stuffed animals and myself in the next room. Could play for hours!

Re: Home activities with your 2.5 year old?

We do the same things. I also have taped huge sheets of paper to the wall and let her use some brushes and she goes to town.

We also do 'projects' - like in art class. I'll cut up some shapes and she will glue them to paper and then decorate with paint pens, glitter glue, stickers.

I also have a bag of dyed pasta that she will either string into necklaces or glue onto paper (or paper plates) and decorate.

Throw down some plastic, take out your beach/sandbox toys and bring in some snow.

Then she has her legos, Lincoln logs, dolls, board games, etc.

Re: Home activities with your 2.5 year old?

A lot of my friends with girl toddlers do painting, drawing, arts/crafts type of things. My 3 year old DS gets bored and restless doing that after about 10 minutes tops.

I feel like every day, somehow, he needs to let off steam, physically. So, I try to take him to an indoor play gym on crummy weather days. He is in school 2x a week, and they do an hour of physical activity there. He also has music class, which involves a lot of dancing and movement.

When we cannot/don't feel like leaving the house: then I play lots of music, and we dance around. Also, I let him take cushions off our casual den couch, put them on the floor. He will play for a while, jumping on them, building a fort, etc.

Re: Home activities with your 2.5 year old?

Re: Home activities with your 2.5 year old?

TUNNELS!
haha I was home yesterday with her.

We danced
We colored
We did ‘tea’
We read Hop on Pop 8 times (I’ve read it so many times I don’t HAVE to read it, I just blurt out the words while I watch TV *shame* and even include “look three fish, one, two, three) I am beginning to hate this book.
She read 5 little monkeys (followed the pictures and knows the story) while I flipped pages.
We played with her bazillion toys in her room
She watched Mickey Mouse

And we tunneled. I put up the sheets on the sofa and draped them down to boxes, pillows etc. She would go round and round tunneling through her castle. Peek a boo, putting her toys in there, playing, pretending. Bought me an hour.

With Nap being super long (thankfully) and us getting home around 10am, this was just enough to keep her entertained until Daddy came home!

Re: Home activities with your 2.5 year old?

There are alot of creative mom blogs out there that have been helping us through this dreary winter....

A couple of really fun activities we've come across and have been great are:

-monster truck painting: taking two of his monster truck match box cars, dipping their wheels in paint, and making tire tracks all over big peices of paper. holy moly did this make painting super fun again!

-Color mixing -DS will stand at the sink with a couple of tupperwares, he'll fill them up with water and then I will drop in a few drops of food dye... he'll stand there and pour the water into other cups, mix the colors basiclally playing mad scientist. a couple drops of food dye in the bathwater has also helped coax DS into the bath on nights where he was not interested.

-we made playdough... its as fun as cooking, but there was less wait time for a finished product, and once it was ready there is a new kind of fun to be had.

-balloon volleyball

here is one blog i think has some cool ideas:
http://www.playcreateexplore.com

i've googled to find other good blogs.

Message edited 2/3/2011 11:00:09 AM.