Toddler Activities - Palmerton,PA

You could make swords out of paper towel tubes and duct tape and have a sword fight. It's really good for getting out energy. Get a few bags of balloons and blow them all up and play with them. Let him take a bath with all the balloons, it's really fun. You can also blow them up, then don't tie them, hold them up high and let go. Get a big box and color it like a car or a house and sit in it. Let him stir things when you're cooking. He might like to crack eggs and scramble them up and then you can cook them for him.

It's getting a little cold to do this, but give him a paint brush and a bucket of water & let him "paint" the deck, driveway, car, house. Both my 3 1/2 year old boy and almost 2 year old daughter LOVE this activity. That's a good activitiy if you just want to sit for a minute. If you want to be active with him, do stickers. It's great fine motor skill development. You might need to get the sticker started by peeling back a corner, but let him pull it off and put it on paper. If you get solid colored gift bags & holiday stickers, he can decorate them with stickers & you can use them as the gift bags for gifts he might be giving to Dad, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. Also, playdough & cookie cutters. Again, it's a hands on activity for you too at this age, but you'll both have fun.
You mentioned he helps making cookies. If you make any sugar cookies (any time of the year if you have the right cookie cutter), let him decorate some with sprinkles or jimmeys (put wax paper down first & then you can use all the extra that goes flying off when he's shaking the container).

One thing you can do with the cold months coming is Letter Of The Week, www.letteroftheweek.com. It's a free web site that starts from birth to age 8-10, learning letters, numbers, colors, shapes, and other things are the child ages. What's neat is that you can tweak the free lessons they lay out to fit your child's needs. The theme of the week can be coordinated with your own field trips. When my trio was almost 3 when they started we did a letter a week with the sound and did a coordinating field trip to match the letter. Letter Aa took us to a local apple orchard. We talked about how applese grow on trees and the parts of the tree and apple. They liked how apples grew on stems for some reason. Bb took us to see boats. We went to Bass Pro Shops to see them all on display and climbed in some of them. Cc took us to see cats at a local pet shop. Dd took us back to see dogs but we also saw some ducks at a local lake. Be creative and while your son is learning (5-10 minutes a day at his age) you can come up with fun crafts and field trip to coordinate to keep you both busy!

K. B
mom to 5 including triplets

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My son is obsessed with legos - I know 2.5 is younger than the recommended age, but for a kid who won't spend more than ten minutes on any activity, I've seen him play with legos for hours on end!

He also loves to dig in the yard with a kid sized shovel, but it's getting a little cold out for that.

My son also likes to help in the kitchen, and last Christmas I discovered that he's really good at using cookie cutters. If you have any cute little shapes, roll out some cookie dough and let him go for it! He'll be really proud to show everyone the cookies he "made."

Other ideas
clay or playdough creations
any thing to do with a ball
build forts out of chairs a sheets
Have fun!

Mega Blocks or the next size down, wooden blocks, painting sugar cookies (with differnt colored icing - I can send the recipe for it if you want it), play-doh, collecting rocks, finding differnt types and color leaves, interactive TV (Play with Me Sesame, Elmocize, etc.)

Good luck!

Let him string macaroni to make decorations to hang around the house.

Find a recipe online for the flour/salt dough that you can bake, then have him use cookie cutters to make Christmas ornaments for family - he can cut them, then you poke a hole in the top for the spring and bake them, then he can paint them and help put the string/ribbon through the hole. Bonus on this, because it's fun for him and you get some Christmas presents made.

Finger paints

Let him make musical instruments out of paper towel roll, TP roll, or by taping 2 paper plates together - just put rice inside, cover the ends, let him tape the ends/tape the plates together with the space in between so the rice can shake. Then he can decorate the outside with stickers, colored tape, or markers.

Take a wooden clothes pin (or even a paper towel roll) and let him choose colors of streamers to tape to one end. Then let him dance to music while waving the streamers around.

I have a 22 month old and here are some of the things we do together aside from outside activities with other kids-

-go the park and play
-walks
-stickers (I just buy lots of cheap construction paper and crayons, and stickers and we make stuff)
-he helps wash vegetables for cooking
-work in the yard (raking leaves, moving rocks, etc)
-when we grocery shop, he puts the produce in the bag and we count it
he also pushes the cart in stores
-we dance, he loves music and loves to dance, we dance probably at least an hour a day
-hide and seek
-nap together, mine still breastfeeds so we cuddle up for naps together
-build stuff with blocks
-read books and count things in books

The list goes on, but these are probably our regular things, aside from in-home activities, we belong to a playgroup with similar parenting ideals and we attend activities 1-3 times per week.

I have a lot of stuff to do while my son (almost 3) is with me. He's the middle child and tends to get swept under the rug a bit when the baby is napping, big sis is at school and I have a couple of hours to accomplish cleaning and stuff. He "sort of" helps, but since I'm in a hurry, I find the key is just being "together" while I do stuff. I put on music so we sort of dance and sing songs while I (we) work, and he LOVES to take scrap pieces of wood, lay them all over, and run his toy cars on them. He's usually around my feet doing that while I do the dishes (after I pretend to let him help for a bit) etc. That way we can keep up a dialogue at least. For the times I can really play with him, he still loves the cars and ramps and building stuff out of "non toys". He also loves reading books the best and "making up songs" on the piano.

Boys are full of energy! I have two myself and what I like to do is to keep them active and creating a learning twist with some of the things we do everyday. The next time you go on a walk, make it a scavenger hunt. Give your son one of his old sand box buckets and try and find something. With the season changing you can create lots of fun activities outside. My son and I went out recently and did a scavenger hunt looking for acorns. We walked all around the neighborhood with the wagon and his bucket picking up acorns. We talked about how we were in the season of fall and that the leave change colors. We also looked for some of the leaves that had fallen on the ground so we could jump on them and crunch them. Some of the more colorful leave we would also pick and put in our bucket. When we were done we came home and put them in a glass jar (you can pick up a canning jar in any grocery store baking isle, they are great to have a couple in your home for these kind of projects). The jar stayed in his play room for about a week and we would talk about it from time to time and he enjoyed playing with it.

For more great ideas on what to do with your child check out my website

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