Category: 2-Year-Old

Rainbow Turkey

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I love capturing handprints at holidays, and I was so thrilled that Veronika held perfectly still for this one! It’s yet another cute craft to celebrate turkeys for the Thanksgiving holiday.

To make a turkey with a multi-colored feathers, paint your child’s thumb and palm with brown washable paint. I then painted two fingers yellow, one red, and one green.

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Press firmly onto construction paper, as flat as possible, and you’ll have a little turkey! You’ll need to work quickly for this step (hence no pictures) and I recommend having wipes ready to clean off your toddler’s hand right away.

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Once the paint dried, it was simply a matter of adding a beak, eye, legs, and wattle from marker. Don’t forget to add the date on the back of this one; it’s a keeper!

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Thanksgiving Place Mat

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It’s never too soon to teach even the youngest kids about thanks and gratitude. Although these concepts are a stretch for a two-year-old to comprehend, certainly Veronika knows what she likes! And that’s the foundation for giving thanks down the line.

We flipped through a magazine together, and whenever we came to an image of something she loves, we cut it out.

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Don’t limit yourself! Even something as simple as bicycles thrill my little toddler these days, so those were clipped out and added to our pile.

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Likewise for images of dogs and beaches and pizza.

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Soon we had a neat little assortment, and she used a glue stick to help me attach the pictures to a background of brown construction paper.

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Cover with clear contact paper to protect against spills and you’ll have the perfect toddler place mat for Thanksgiving day!

Feather Printing

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Not to be confused with feather painting, the idea with this craft wasn’t to paint with a feather but to make images of feathers on paper. The resulting craft makes a great piece of Thanksgiving artwork!

I cut small sponges into shapes roughly resembling feathers (although I confess some looked more like leaves). Our sponges had handles, which makes it easy for Veronika to grasp them, but regular kitchen sponges would work, too.

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Next I set out plates of paint in harvest colors, and showed Veronika how to dip in the paint and then press onto paper.

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She loved the little images that appeared. She was so proud when she could make the sponge as flat as possible for a clear print.

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As a variation, we then painted directly on a few craft feathers.

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These made fun prints when pressed down onto the paper, too!

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“Look what I made!” she proudly said when we were done, and narrated back all the paint colors.

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I love seeing her take pride in her artwork.

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Ten Favorite Transportation Books

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Who says only boys like books about trucks and cars and things that go? We’ve been reading so many books about vehicles lately that I thought would share some of Veronika’s favorites, which hopefully can help fill your home library, too!

One: Baby’s Very First Truck Book, Usborne Books

This one is almost guaranteed to please because it’s not just a book about a truck… It drives!

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We also love that the delivery truck drops off small vehicles (think scooters and bikes) at each stop it makes.

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Two: Little Coloring: Things That Go, Usborne Books

Story time can still be hard for Veronika to sit through, which is why we love this coloring book with text. Each page has a short sentence about a vehicle that I can read as Veronika scribbles!

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Three: Little Blue Truck, Alice Schertle

What’s not to love about this original book from what has gone on to became an equally lovable series? Animal noises, friends helping friends, fun rhyming words…. And every toddler wants to chime in on that little Beep Beep Beep!

Four: Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go

I honestly find this book overwhelming, but my kids love it so much we count it as a favorite. You can read pieces of it here and there, or settle in for a marathon session on days that deserve an extra-long story.

Five: The Little Engine That Could, Watty Piper

This classic features a fun variety of engines for any train lover, but at the heart it’s a story about perseverance and kindness. I still choke up reading the ending every time!

Six: The Big Book of Big Trucks, Usborne Books

If your kids love big trucks (and I mean big!) they’ll love the super-sized fold-out pages in this book about some of the biggest vehicles ever made on the planet.

Seven: Colorful World: Vehicles, Nastja Holtfreter

This book takes Veronika’s favorite theme of vehicles but poses questions that become increasingly tricky as the story goes on. She can readily identify which scooter is different, or which one is a tow truck,. But what about pinpointing a truck driving in a different direction? Or new vocabulary like which one is a convertible. High marks for the writing in this book!

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Eight: Shine-a-Light at the Garage, Carron Brown and Charlie Davis

The Shine-a-Light series always makes books intriguing since kids shine a flashlight to uncover a mystery on each page. In this particular volume, kids learn all the goings-on inside a mechanic’s garage. We love the technical details!

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Nine: Night, Night Busy Town, Usborne Books

You get multiple books for the price of one here. Each sleepy vehicle on the chunky board book pages has a favorite bedtime story to read.

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These mini books pull out with a tab and are just the right size for toddler hands. Each one then features a different learning theme (numbers, shapes, opposites, etc.).

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Ten: Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site, Sherri Duskey Rinker

The rhymes are fantastic in this one and the construction trucks curl up to sleep with teddy bears. Enough said.

Okay, one last notable mention: We love Little Tug by Stephen Savage for a sweet bedtime read about a sometimes-neglected category of vehicles: boats!

What vehicle books are a must-have in your family? Please share in the comments!

Shaving Cream Car Wash

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Veronika loves a song about going to the car wash, so I knew she would enjoy making the concept come to life with her favorite toy cars!

Shaving cream does double-duty in this game. It can either be the snow and muck getting cars dirty, or the soapy suds washing them off, depending how your toddler wants to play!

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I squirted a generous amount of shaving cream onto a tray, and showed her how to drive her cars through.

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The shaving cream is so fun to scoop up with any construction vehicles your child has. It’s also great for making tracks.

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But Veronika preferred the second step of our “car wash”, which was transferring the cars over to a bucket of warm clean water. Now, the shaving cream dissolved into suds and the water was soon thick and soapy.

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“The car’s in the muck!” she said with delight. She loved swimming the cars through this bin for quite a long time.

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Finally, we really did need to get them clean! So I added a second tray of warm water to get off the last of the suds.

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Every car was soon toweled dry and sparkly clean.

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Smart Art

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For toddlers who know their shapes, this art activity is a fun next-step up, getting them to think about how shapes link together to form familiar objects.

To start, I cut out various shapes from multiple colors of construction paper, including hearts and diamonds, as well as familiar favorites like rectangles and triangles.

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Now, guide your toddler through turning these various shapes into things they see in the world. If I put down a square, could she put a triangle on top to make it the roof of a house?

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She could! I talked her through what other shapes we might see around a house, like a smaller square for the door, or a circular sun in the sky. The concept was easiest for her if I squirted glue down in a corresponding shape first. So if she saw a circle of glue, she could glue down a circle of paper.

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Now she had a moon in her city sky! The same was true as I coached her through triangular mountains or tall rectangles for city buildings.

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Of course you can also just let your toddler have fun and glue the shapes wherever he or she wants to! Veronika did a bit of this, too, adding her own creative stamp to the project.

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We ended up with a fun variety of scenes, including one that looked like a city at night and another that resembled a mountain landscape.

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Cardboard Box Ramps

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Here’s a great use for the box from your latest package delivery, before you send it the way of the recycle bin!

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We received a large box in the mail and I knew it would be perfect for this activity. I cut off the side flaps, and then used duct tape to attach them to the insides of the box at angles. I had originally thought I might hot glue them, but duct tape seemed to work better to achieve the right angle. Veronika loved “helping” by adding some extra duct tape on top.

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Before taping on, cut a hole into each “ramp” so objects can fall from one ramp to the next. I also cut a hole in the top of the box as the starting point.

Time to see if the ramps worked! Veronika loved dropping a golf ball through the hole on top. Sometimes it rolled perfectly from one ramp to the next!

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Other times it rolled off the sides, but this didn’t dampen Veronika’s fun. You might consider some sort of buffer, though, (perhaps made from additional duct tape) to prevent this from happening. You could also place little jars at the bottom to catch the ball at the end of its run, if your child would enjoy that!

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After playing with the balls for a while, we decided to test toy cars.

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These didn’t work quite as well on the ramps, but it did turn the box into a fun little “garage” for a while.

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Chock-Full of Blocks

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Here’s a fun spin on block play if your toddler is growing tired of simply building towers up and knocking them down.

I gave Veronika a small box and challenged her to fill the bottom of it completely with blocks so that none of the bottom showed. She didn’t understand at first, but I modeled the behavior and she soon joined in the fun.

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She did also try to build up a little once our bottom was covered!

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The box was quite small so we decided that we needed a bigger space to work with. Mark out a square or rectangle on your floor with painter’s tape and show your toddler how to fill that space with the blocks.

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This was a great way for Veronika to see how some shapes fit together to form others, too! Two triangles made squares in some of our corners, and two squares could make a rectangle. Obviously she needed a lot of my help for this activity, but it was a fun project to tackle together.

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As a bonus, she also loved the clean-up, throwing all the blocks back into the bin one-by-one until the tape square was empty once more.

Puzzle Pursuit

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Here’s a fun way not just to do puzzles with a toddler, but to make finding the pieces a part of the puzzle, too!

Veronika and I played around with this idea in two ways. For the first, I wanted puzzle pieces that were small enough to fit inside of plastic Easter eggs (well, they almost fit), leaving them slightly open and in very obvious hiding spots. I was hiding them for a two-year-old after all!

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I laid a few of the puzzle pieces out on the coffee table to capture Veronika’s interest, but then told her, “Oh no! Where are the rest of the pieces?”

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The bright plastic egg colors caught her eye, and she was soon trotting off to bring the pieces over.

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A jigsaw puzzle is beyond her abilities, but she loved watching the images of favorite trucks come together.

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She even slotted in the final few pieces!

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For the second version of the game, I used a chunky toddler puzzle that she can solve all by herself. Once more I hid the pieces, although “hiding” was again a relative term, really just scattering the pieces under nearby pillows.

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She was so delighted when she spotted them and immediately knew how to fit each animal over its image on the puzzle board.

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Hmm, she was missing three pieces. Was anything hiding under the scarf?

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Ta da!

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I loved watching her brain do double the puzzling in this fun activity.

Dry Leaf Collage

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This is not the craft to make when the leaves are at their peak vibrant hues of orange and red early in the fall. This is the craft for late in the fall, when the leaves are dry and brown, and yet you’ll show your toddler beauty even in this underappreciated nature material!

Veronika and I came home with a bag full of just such leaves, and first we explored them on her sensory tray. She loved picking them up and letting them float down.

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I next showed her how to rip the leaves into tiny pieces. The dry crinkly November leaves are perfect for this because each rip produces a satisfying sound.

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As she tore them up, I traced two leaf shapes on construction paper and cut them out. Any fall color would make a nice background here, and we used brown and orange.

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Rub glue sticks all over the leaf shapes, and then press down your leaf “confetti”.

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As a bonus, these make a beautiful Thanksgiving decoration if you punch a hole near the top, thread with yarn, and suspend in a window.

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