What do you do with two and three year olds

[Coldhandscoldheart]

Particularly if raining and no access to garden.
We can go out for a welly walk, but they are likely to want to stay in for a couple of hours. Feeling a bit short on ideas today.

Use blankets or sheets to make an indoor den.
Teddy bear/doll picnic
Hide and seek with a teddy bear
Helping Mum/Dad (which makes any job take 3times as long)
Teach them Sleeping Lions

Visit a large garden centre or pets at home and look at the fish or hamsters.

Bake a cake or some biscuits.

Make puppets from - wooden spoons or lolly sticks or hard boiled eggs even.

Take all the pots and pans out of the cupboard and play them like drums.

Sticker books, colouring and play doh on rainy days!

Baking or 'helping' with cooking, make a den from blankets, build duplo towers, read loads of books. To be honest my 3 year old is also happy to play on his own with trains/vehicles/duplo.

Lego/Duplo

Orchard Toys games if you have any (2 year old might be a bit young)

Water play at kitchen sink (put towels on floor, step stool, let them go for it)

Moon sand keeps my eldest busy for hours, he loved it age 2 and he’s 4 now! 8 cups flour to 1 cup baby oil. It’s really soft and sticks together so can make sandcastles.

Get their toys out - they can play, you sit and read a book 🤷‍♀️ Not everything has to be structured

Oh I wish they would play while I read! Playdoh’s a good call I forgot we’ve got some.
I will look up sleeping lions.

Make Sainsbury’s the highlight of our day, more CBeebies than we should, books, colouring, play kitchen.
Have a soft play locally that’s closed at the moment, but usually we would descend there along with every other child in a 3 mile radius.
It sucks!!!!

Libary? swimming ? the dreaded soft play ? local museum (garden at science museum is fab).
Depends on DC, my active DS could just about cope with a morning afternoon in at that age, but not both.

morning or afternoon.

Ceebeebies?!

I used to love getting the Lego duplo out on days like this and building. We had lots of building things around this age with DC. I used to make huge Toot toot tracks or dig out the trainset and make a big track with that. Usually I could spend the time building something with them and then let them loose on it to play on their own for a bit.

Playdoh, painting and drawing were other things we would do. If we were feeling flush I'd take them to soft play for a while.

Sleeping lions = a competition between the dc to see who can lie quietly for longest.

A long bath that involves lots of toys containers etc that don’t normally go in the bath going in

Singing and action songs

Call/ Skype grandma or other relative

You

Missed one- if you have a large box eg from washing machine put them inside with markers to colour the inside of the box

Get out all The musical toys and then bang, crash, shake along to nursery rhymes on U tube.

Make a den.

Play hide and seek.

Make fairy cakes.

Painting/sticking/potato printing.

Puppet show behind the sofa.

Jumping on the bed.

Build slopes and bridges for toy cars.

Trainset and Skyping grandma added!
How do you sell sleeping lions? They’re used to sleeping bunnies where something happens (although I stretch it out as long as I can!).
Two yo is only just two, so isn’t quite grasping competition yet.

YouTube yoga! That’s a thing.
Thanks for ideas, I felt a bit stalled this morning.

I love a good imagination game. We used to build things like a rocket ship (chairs for seats, airing rack with sheet over for nose and on one occassion I lit one of those birthday sparklers to signify take off once we were all skipping roped in) and fly to the moon.

The DC had to pack the rocket, important toys etc. Usually we'd have a picnic on the moon or mars.

We also used to like a pirate ship adventure or trecking through the jungle and finding wild animals (animal teddies hidden around the house)

Teddy birthday parties were another fun activity. Blowing up balloons, musical bumps, pass the parcel (a toy they already have wrapped up multiple times (great roll play practice for the real thing) decorating plain biscuits or cakes with icing and sweets/ sprinkles to get ready for the party.

Another lively game for burning off energy is getting from one bit of furniture to another without touching the floor. We throw all the scatter cushions and throws on the floor then I selectively move them around to make it more challenging. You can practice counting how many jumps between etc.

Magic painting was always popular with mine around that age.