7 Cool Ideas to Bond With Your Toddler

Children naturally love to play and it is an important tool to their development as it improves their physical, social, mental and emotional wellbeing. The onus therefore lies on parents to regularly devise fun ways to keep them engaged and spend quality time with you. Here are a few fun ideas:

1. Story Telling: You can make this either an indoor or outdoor experience. Read an interesting story book out loud to your child in a role play manner, ensuring to stimulate your child’s imagination with the characters, and animals in the story. You could also create your own story and tell it to your child.

2. Use Songs and Rhymes: Children get fascinated and excited by songs and rhymes even when they don’t make sense. According to Dr. Wendy S. Masi, “rhymes also make language more interesting and memorable, and they help you talk to your toddler on a level you can both enjoy.” As you sing and rhyme, make use of hand gestures and facial expression to complement the words and sounds. Also, smile and clap your hands when you sing. You’ll find your toddler imitating you.

3. Burst the Bubbles: To encourage movement, stimulate eye-to-hand co-ordination, and introduce the concept of big and small, high and low, making, blowing, and chasing bubbles is the perfect opportunity. Your toddler will most likely enjoy this activity that she’ll keep asking you to continue, therefore, ensure you have a large supply of bubbles. Bubble blowing can be done outdoors or indoors but it’s best outdoors because the floor can easily become wet and messy.

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4. Hide and Seek: When engaging a toddler in a game of hide and seek, hide in areas where your toddler can easily find you with parts of your body visible. Remember, that your toddler is still very dependent and may become frightened if he’s unable to find you, so make yourself easy to find by making little noises, or coughing.

5. Pass the Ball: Whether it’s indoors on a carpet, or outdoors on a mat or blanket, sit down with your toddler facing you, putting a little distance between you two. Reach out to your toddler with the soft ball and encourage her to give you back the ball. This will improve her hand and eye co-ordination.

6. Groove to the Beat: Work in some rhythmic movement into your toddler’s body through dance. Slot in a CD with danceable beats and watch your toddler groove. Ensure that the lyrics of the beat are children friendly, so your toddler can learn and sing along. Avoid playing music with lyrics that are not suitable for children, no matter how groovy the beats sound.

7. Have a Toy Hunt: Select some toys that your toddler is very familiar with and hide them around the house or play area. Try not to make the hidden items to difficult to find until he has mastered the game. Have a pictures or drawings of the items, and help him cross the ones he finds out.