Indoor Toddler Activities

This winter has been especially mild for us, but because I had Jones we spent a lot more time at home. I am sharing some of my favorite cold/rainy day toddler activities !

One of my favorites is the oatmeal sensory bin. My best friend who is an OT told me about this when Clark was little. You probably have everything to make this in your house right now. A tupperware container with a lid, oatmeal and a few random toys. In ours we have some plastic animals, an easter egg, different kinds of spoons, a small bowl and a tiny tupperware container. The kids love covering the animals and then trying to find them in the oatmeal, they love scooping and dumping. Sometimes it gets messy but hey, that’s what vacuums are for. If it can buy me 30 minutes to get dinner going or the dishes done, I’m all for it.

Next up, rainbow rice. The kids LOVE it. Once again, you need some type of storage. I prefer a big container vs the size of the oatmeal one. This way you can have more rice, they can really dig in and it’s more space to play in. The ingredients are simple, rice, vinegar and food coloring. You’ll also need ziploc bags and somewhere to dry the rice like plates or a cookie sheet. I got this idea from Busy Toddler. She is amazing! (I doubled the recipe below so I had enough for Clark and Ada to play at the same time.)

1 cup of rice
1 tablespoon of white vinegar
A few squirts of food coloring

Then the fun part, close up the bag and shake, shake, shake. The kids enjoyed helping me with this part. Once the colors are mixed well I poured each one onto a baking sheet to dry. This only took an hour or two. You can put whatever you’d like in the bin. Clark loves driving his monster trucks in it and using it with his dinosaurs. Ada loves any type of scoop, cup, bowl, funnel - give the girl all the pouring and dumping things.

Another current favorite are these… I just found them this year and boy are they great. I bought the castle when Jones was 2 weeks old. I wasn’t healing as quickly as I thought I would (doing to much I am sure,) and I needed activities we could do while sitting. I have the rocket on reserve for a day we really need it. Since they are so big it takes days to color and then they intermittently play with it. I JUST folded up the castle and moved it to the basement for storage. They were using it almost daily for a while. It is a relatively inexpensive purchase you get from the comfort of your own bed at 3am while feeding a newborn, hahah. Here is the rocket and here is the castle.

I asked on Instagram what some of your favorite activities were and here they are…
Shaving cream letter / numbers
Water beads
Sand table
Bean table
Kinetic sand (we love this too!)
Water bin