Activities for Younger Toddlers

It hit me the other day that we no longer have a baby in the house....we have a full on toddler. She was pushing boundaries the other day and doing all kinds of climbing.

She still pretty much just wants to run around the house tearing things up though and it is starting to drive me crazy. The amount of picking up I do during the day is amazing. Little Miss Almost 14 months old won't return to play with any overturned items/messy toys. I have to pick it back up for her to play with them more.

The other hard part has been finding activities that Shane and Adalyn can happily do together. One of my goals for this year is to make sure I have prepared activities for both kiddos on a regular basis. This helps to pass the time for me and helps add some excitement to our days. Productive Parenting has a lot of great ideas including the younger set.

These are two games we played yesterday.

Toss The Sock:
I found two containers (medium and small) and grabbed the balled up socks from Adalyn's drawer. I put the containers in the middle of the floor and put the socks around the room. Then the kiddos "tossed the socks" into the bins. Pretty darn simple, but they both had fun and could play together! I had Shane toss from further away. Adalyn loved tossing and then dumping.

Adalyn and Shane playing.

They were into it for about 15+ minutes, 

which I thought was great for such a simple game.

 Shane and Arli playing.

Arli gave it about 1 round and then moved onto other things.

Find the Animal:
I had Shane line up a bunch of stuff animals. Then with a flash light he pointed to one and asked Adalyn to "find the bear" or "find the baby", etc. She loved finding the baby and then kissing it. But she wasn't so into finding any of the other animals. Shane loved telling his Sister what to do.

Both of these activities target:

• following directions
• large gross motor skills
• eye and hand coordination
• cooperation
• simple fun!