Summer activities for your toddlers

So moms, what do you do to keep your active toddlers from sitting in front of the TV, or in my case, from playing computer games? (thanks to my techie husband!) If you have a favorite game, activity, project, or internet site where you get resources, let’s start sharing our ideas! Summer is hardly over, and I’m running out of options! 

Today, my toddler helped me clean the kitchen and make banana bread. He poured and stirred everything. He also played in the wading pool…for all of about 10 minutes. Sometimes, I think it takes more time to set up an activity than it does for them to play with it! Before you know it, they’re ready to move on! It can be difficult to occupy a toddler for 8-10 hours a day, especially when they don’t take naps! I still insist on 30-minutes of quiet time (in bed laying down) each afternoon. It is a necessary break for me mostly, but every now and then he does fall asleep!

During the day we do things together like play puzzles, read, practice saying our alphabet and counting, and play chase and hide-and-go-seek. We go to parks, and do grocery shopping errands together too. One day, I got really creative and found red beans in my pantry. We put them in a canning jar and shook them making up different rhythms. Then, we took them out and outlined shapes with them, and after that, put counted them in groups. He learned how to point to each one only once and count it and then stop when all were accounted for!

When the newness of that was all over, my son wanted to eat them. I said they were too hard to eat and needed cooking. He definitely wanted to cook them! I said, “Sure, let’s have them for lunch.” When they cooked in the water my son even noticed that the skins on the beans got wrinkly (like his hands after a long time in the bath). 

I was so excited he would eat a nutritious lunch that day, but my optimism dropped when he took one look at the now mushy, cooked red beans on his plate and said, “I don’t like them.” I tried to eat my share and didn’t really like them either, so we got something else for lunch too.

My son also likes talking his toys. He gives me a car, or a dinosaur, or a Little People figure, and says, “Here, Mommy, talk them.” I enjoy seeing his imagination develop. I have also found this a great way to teach him things in conversation while we play. Oh, we talk about racing cars and we make scary dinosaur noises, but we also discuss how cars go, and who made the dinosaurs. We talk about the story of creation, and Noah and the Ark. (Then he wants to get all of his animals out!) His language skills are developing fast, and he is learning something each day through play.

It isn’t realistic for me to give him full attention 8-10 hours a day so I rely on him to play by himself for an hour at a time throughout the day, and he gets outdoor play time where I am watching him, but not interacting. Then, when I run out of ideas, he watches children movies and computer games until daddy comes home. So, what else is there to do with your toddlers? Let’s share ideas!