3-Year-Olds
Activities for 3-year-olds.
Three brings a noticeable jump: activities can have two or three steps, pretend play gets going properly, and a child will sit with something for ten or fifteen minutes if it is the right something.
It also brings firm views about doing it their own way. Activities with a fixed right answer tend to go badly; open ones with no wrong version go well.
Cutting, gluing, threading and sorting all become possible around now, usually messily. Child scissors and a low table are the two things that make the biggest difference.
Activities
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I Spy, But With Sounds
The same game you already know, played with the sound a word starts with instead of the letter. Needs nothing at all.
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Counting the Stairs (and Everything Else)
Not really an activity — a habit. Counting things out loud all day does more for early maths than any worksheet.
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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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Collect the Leaves, Then Sort Them
A bag, a walk, and a kitchen table. The collecting is half of it and the sorting is the other half.
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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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Painting With Water
A bucket of water and a big brush. They paint the wall, the fence and the path, it dries, and they do it again. No mess at all.
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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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Mixing Colours Without the Mess
Two blobs of paint sealed in a freezer bag. They squash it, the colour changes, and nothing gets on anything.