Household Items
Household Items ideas for children aged 2 to 8.
Everything in this section uses what is already in the kitchen, the recycling or the bathroom cupboard: cardboard boxes, pegs, muffin tins, colanders, sponges, tin foil, dried pasta, cotton wool, old socks, a roll of masking tape.
It is here because "we could do that, if only we had..." is where most activity ideas die. If you have a box and some tape, you can start now.
Masking tape and a cardboard box do more than any toy in the house, and both appear over and over. If you buy one thing after reading this site, make it a roll of masking tape.
Activities
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Noisy Shakers and a Jar of Good Things
One loud activity and one quiet one. Make shakers for the countdown, and a jar to look back at next year.
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Cloud Dough You Can Make in Two Minutes
Flour and oil, mixed in a bowl. It holds its shape when you squeeze it and collapses into powder when you poke it, which is the whole appeal.
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Threading Pasta Necklaces
Dry pasta tubes and a shoelace. Quiet, absorbing, and one of the best things you can do for a small hand.
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Paper Plate Animal Masks
One paper plate, some paint and a lolly stick. Twenty minutes of making and an afternoon of being a tiger.
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Cardboard Box Marble Run
Cut a delivery box into ramps and tape them inside the lid. It never works first time, and that is the entire point of it.