20 Activities for Toddlers

Here are 20 fun and simple activities for toddlers that will keep them engaged and busy with sensory, fine motor, problem solving and curiosity!

If you, like me, have a busy 2 year old in your home or work setting, you’ll already know how much they like to get their hands into everything, investigating how things work, what you can do with them, what something feels like and how much mess and noise they can create! This is the absolute bursting point of discovery and their development is so rapid at this stage of their busy little lives. They need to find out about the world as much as possible by doing, moving and handling, and they need to do that by trying it for themselves.

Aside from the usual (and very necessary) trips to the park, supermarket, play ground and other day to day activities in the home and out and about in the neighbourhood, this collection of 20 activities have all been tried and tested with my 3 children and proven to be easy to set up, engaging for them to test out and great for those busy little hands and brains!

Enjoy now or pin your favourites for later (by clicking through to the individual post then pressing Pin It):

Threading with giant cardboard beads

Play a hide and seek game to find the matching pairs

Construct towers with hair rollers

Make and play with these simple DIY fine motor toys from recycled materials

Drop coloured pom poms down the rainbow coloured tubes

Make a nursery rhyme themed sensory or water play tub. Sing along together!

 Set up one of these simple Discovery Boxes to explore new materials and how they can be used together

Make them a little digging and sensory garden patch to play in

Go on a colour hunt and sing this song together

Sort coloured pom poms into rainbow egg cartons

Make pictures and patterns on the window with foam and water

Create a giant rainbow collage together

Make a colour themed sensory tub to play in

Paint and explore with toddler-safe DIY finger-paints

Try painting with Jello finger-paints. (They smell amazing!)

Mix potions and natural materials in the water table

Drop pom poms through a tube and shoot them out again. Guaranteed to produce heaps of giggles!

Squish hands into a giant tub of rainbow spaghetti!

Set toys into sparkly jelly and get up to your elbows to find them again!

Print shapes using cardboard tubes

Drive trains or cars on a DIY chalkboard table

Watch things swirl and make noises with toddler safe discovery bottles

Make our best ever no-cook play dough recipe and use it to make birthday cake, roll out snakes, push in twigs and buttons etc and explore!

Want some more ideas? Here are 20 fun ways to introduce colours to preschoolers:

And here is our full Toddler Play archive for more browsing when you have some time! There are literally dozens and dozens of ideas, so I was only able to select a few for this collection.

Are you looking for Baby Play Ideas? We have those too! See a collection in this post:

I hope these are helpful! Let me know which are your favourites if you try any.