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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Salt Dough Christmas Ornaments
Flour, salt and water become something you hang on the tree every year after.
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Handprint Reindeer Cards
A hand, upside down, is a reindeer. Nobody sees it until you show them.
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Paper Plate Christmas Wreath
Cut the middle out of a paper plate and you have a wreath that takes any decoration you like.
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Popsicle Stick Christmas Trees
Three sticks, a triangle, and as much decorating as they have patience for.
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Count the Pumpkin Seeds
Wash and dry the seeds from your pumpkin, then turn them into a counting game that lasts all week.
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Print Hearts With a Cardboard Tube
Squash a kitchen roll tube into a heart shape and use it as a stamp. One tube makes forty hearts.
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A Post Box for Kind Notes
A cereal box with a slot cut in it. Everyone posts a note about somebody else, and you read them out at dinner.
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Grow Hair on an Eggshell
Half an eggshell, a face drawn on, cotton wool and cress seeds. In a week it has green hair you can eat.
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Five Ways to Decorate an Egg With No Dye
Stickers, felt tips, wool, tissue paper and tape. All five work on a hard-boiled egg and none of them stain anything.
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The Button Who Wanted a Coat
A story about a lost button, and then a jar of real buttons to sort afterwards.
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A Masking Tape Obstacle Course
One roll of tape turns a hallway into a course to balance, jump and crawl along. Works in a flat, upstairs, in the rain.
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Turning a Box Into a Shop
A delivery box, a marker and whatever is in the cupboard. Then step back, because the play runs itself.
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Getting the Energy Out in a Small Room
Four ways to wear a child out indoors without breaking anything or annoying the neighbours downstairs.
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A Shape Hunt Round the House
Circles, squares and triangles are already everywhere. Give them a list and let them find them.
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Building Your Name Out of Sticks
Straight lines make most capital letters. Lolly sticks, twigs or straws turn letter shapes into something you build rather than draw.
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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.