There are affiliate links in many of the posts on this site. This means your purchase supports myself, my business, and my family when you click through to buy - at no additional cost to you. This site also uses cookies. You can learn more here. Thank you!
As a teacher my favorite place was always in the early childhood classroom. Many of my colleagues found that a bit hard to believe since I did so well with the upper elementary students, but it’s the truth. So I thoroughly enjoy doing fun projects and crafts with our son. And I can’t wait to do them with our daughter as well! Today I want to share these two toddler activities using fine motor skills. They’re easy, fun, and only take a few minutes to whip together. (Plus chances are good that you already have all the materials on hand!)
This post contains affiliate links. You can read my entire disclosure statement here.
Card Drop
Grab a container of some sort. I’ve seen people use washed out oatmeal canisters, but I grabbed the nearest empty peanut butter jar. Cutting a square out of the lid was the hardest part of the “prep” in this activity – but even that only took me about two minutes. Then grab a deck of old cards and start stuffing them in. That’s it!
Our little man is now 2.5 and he still loves doing this activity from time to time. I’ve just made the items he has to put in even smaller – pom poms, his farm animal toys, or whatever else we have around the house.
Pom Pom “Track”
This one was a huge hit all last winter. I was able to grab some pom poms at the local dollar store, but you can also get some on Amazon. But even before you grab the pom poms, start collecting cardboard cylinders. Toilet paper rolls and paper towel tubes work great – but I’ve also saved a couple wrapping paper tubes for use this winter.
Then simply find an empty wall and affix them using a tape that won’t cause any damage to your paint or wall. (We love using Frog Tape!) Make sure to keep the top of the tubing where little arms can reach it.
We started with a very simple two tube track. They overlapped just a tiny bit (as you can see in the picture), so that way the pom pom “had” to fall the right way. Then we started adding more “tracks” so the pom pom could do different ways and so little man could explore different tubes to see what happened.
Our carpet ended up being a huge pom pom mess, but it was a blast! He loved it! We loved helping him “build” new tracks, and we honestly spent a few evenings last winter just enjoying this activity.
These toddler activities using fine motor skills are such a hit that I know we’ll be doing them again as our daughter gets to this age. We’ll see what other ones I can add to our rotation to have even more fun – particularly on those cold South Dakota days when we’re stuck inside. (Days. Who am I kidding? Sometimes we’re stuck inside for a week or more due to the cold temps!)
We could probably do even more toddler activities using fine motor skills, but life always seems to get busy. So instead we continue to pull from the many great ideas at this blog post.